


Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead

by SylvanWitch



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Blood Drinking, Blood and Torture, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, John McGarrett's a vampire, M/M, Oral Sex, Wo Fat's a vampire, handcuffs put to interesting use, season one AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 16:23:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19360507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: A week after Steve puts his father in the ground, he sees John McGarrett leaving JJ Dolan’s.Or, a Season One AU in which John McGarrett is a vampire, Wo Fat's a Master, and Steve's life is complicated by more than just a cocky New Jersey transplant.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Given the canonical fact that people significant to Steve lie to him with annoying regularity, it occurred to me that maybe the initial "murder" that brought the team together might also be another lie in a long list of them. This was supposed to be a brief story of how Danny knew something that Steve didn't know. You can see for yourself how that worked out.
> 
> This is my first foray into this fandom. I have two episodes left in S9 to watch, so I'm new to H50 but so happy to be here.
> 
> Also, the title is taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life."

A week after Steve puts his father in the ground, he sees John McGarrett leaving JJ Dolan’s.  He’d been tracking down a lead in Chinatown, rolling slow, searching storefronts for an unnumbered Chinese medicine shop, but rolling or not, Steve knows what he sees.

 

It’s true that Steve didn’t spend much time with his father in the last decade or more, but that only means he’s committed what he remembers to memory, and no one— _no_ _one_ —walked like John McGarrett on a mission.

 

Wherever his dead father’s going, someone is going to be sorry they pissed him off.

 

By the time Steve double-parks and throws himself out of the truck, there’s no sign of his father.

 

One shootout, two interrogations, and three beers with the team later, Steve has mostly forgotten the incident, chalking it up to the weird way the brain works through its grief.

 

*****

 

Two weeks into the uneasy partnership he’s established with Danny, Steve comes in late to find Chin, Kono, and his partner with their heads together over the smart table; the unmirrored overhead monitors all show the same scene—a rainbow over Konahuanui.  Something in the way their eyes dart up and they break apart reminds him uneasily of herd animals scattering at the approach of a predator.

 

He doesn’t like feeling left out, likes even less their suspicious behavior and the way they look at him like he’s trouble, and it niggles at him all through the day’s tedious footwork, Danny crowing about “real police work” while Steve stews in his discomfort, finally snapping at his partner when he insists on changing the radio station.

 

“What’s your problem?” Danny asks, and Steve wishes he knew.  “You’ve been more than usually uptight all day, you know that?”

 

He does know it, and he’s ashamed of himself, a little, but he can’t shake the feeling that his team is keeping something from him.

 

That feeling is exacerbated when they end up catching a lead, chasing the guy through an alley, and hauling him, a little the worse for wear, back to the Palace, where Chin asks if he can interrogate the suspect because they “have a connection,” one upon which Chin is overly vague, and Kono gives Steve big eyes to get him to cave.

 

He does, gracelessly, huffing off to his office like a teenager in a sulk.  He knows he’s doing it, but he can’t help it.  There’s something hinky going on—he can feel it in his bones.

 

By the time Chin emerges from interrogation, Steve’s suspicion has blossomed into hyper-awareness and is about to tip over into some full-on paranoia. 

 

When Steve stalks out of his office to see what Chin’s got, Danny says, “Will you relax?  You’re making me tense just looking at you,” which is rich, considering the source.

 

Steve ignores Danny: “What’d you get, Chin?”

 

Chin shakes his head.  “I don’t think he’s our guy.”

 

“Yeah, why’s that?”  He’s not trying to hide his disbelief, and he’s not imagining the shadow that flickers in Chin’s eyes.

 

Chin shrugs and exchanges a microsecond look with Kono.  Steve catches Danny’s aborted reaction out of the corner of his eye, and he’s about to pounce on it when Chin says, “Just a feeling.”

 

“Okay,” Steve says.  “What the fuck is going on?”

 

Kono sidles up to him, but he crosses his arms over his chest and glares her down.  He’s not being cajoled out of his mood this time.

 

This time it’s a three-way glance, and Steve clenches his teeth to keep from shouting.  He tells himself it’s not hurt, just anger, that’s fueling his outrage, but a part of him knows better, even if he doesn’t let that part drive too often.

 

When the tension has sucked all the air out of the room, Danny moves in, apparently appointed sacrificial lamb.  Maybe they think he’s the least likely to lose a limb to Steve’s obvious fury.  Maybe the other two figure to let the haoles sort it out.

 

It’s an unjust observation, but Steve is beyond caring.  His eyes fall on Danny, and his partner actually winces, so Steve can imagine the expression he’s wearing.  Freddie had called it “resting murder face.”

 

Yeah.

 

“We should go into your office,” Danny begins, which is the wrong thing to say.  Steve is tired of being managed, and that must be telegraphed in some shifting of the muscles of his face because Danny puts both hands up like he’s trying to stop a runaway train—a futile, almost involuntary gesture. 

 

If he’d moved on to “maybe you should sit down for this,” Steve wouldn’t have been responsible for the bloodshed that followed, but thankfully, Danny’s got better sense.

 

“Okay.  Okay.  So, I get that I’m the new guy around here, but it happens that I might know a thing or two about the Islands that you don’t.”

 

There’s a subsonic vibration in Steve’s back teeth which must be his molars groaning.

 

Sensing it, Danny rushes on.  “Vampires are real, and they live here on Oahu, and actually all the other islands, too.  And the mainland, but my understanding is that they’re somewhat different there.  I’m not really clear on the distinction.  But all you need to know right now is that there are bloodsuckers walking around and some of them are bad guys, and, um, there are people like us”—punctuated with one of Danny’s eloquent gestures—“who kind of…hunt them.”

 

That…

 

“That’s insane.  Are you insane?”  Steve’s mouth is running ahead of his brain, because even as Danny sputters into an indignant retort, he’s remembering the figure of his dead father painted in neon bar lights.

 

“Wait,” he orders, holding up a hand.

 

Miraculously, Danny stops talking.

 

Steve isn’t aware of what he’s looking at or what the others in the room are doing.  His brain is rearranging the details of his life at a rate that leaves him literally reeling.  He puts out a hand to steady himself on the smart table, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and holds it for a thirty-count.

 

Then he stands up straight, scans his eyes across the three of them, and says, “Explain.  _Every_ thing.  Now.”

 

God help him, they do.

 

*****

 

It is surprisingly easy to see the signs now that he knows what to look for.  The undead move at night, though they could go out under the sun under specific—but irritatingly mysterious—circumstances.  They could be killed by the usual methods—stake through the heart, beheading, fire.

 

“Garlic’s a myth,” Danny had said during that initial, mind-blowing briefing.

  
“Holy water, too,” Chin had added, and when Steve said, “Why?” it was Kono who’d fired back, calm and efficient and with a certain sharklike coldness in her eyes that had made Steve proud. 

 

“Vampires predate Christianity.  The earliest records of them go all the way back to ancient Sumeria, way before Jesus was even a gleam in his daddy’s eye.  In theory, holy items from a vampire’s religion at the time of their turning may affect them somewhat, but only if they were devout before they were turned and only if you have the right symbol or substance or combination thereof.”

 

It had been a lot to take in, but Steve had learned to assimilate intel, assess threat levels, and determine strategy while bleeding from shrapnel wounds and shouting over incoming heavy artillery, so he did alright.

 

“Basically,” Danny had summarized, “It’s too much of a pain in the ass to try to figure it out, so we don’t bother.”

 

That “we” bothered Steve, but he’d tried to let it go.  It had rankled that they’d kept it a secret from him, but it helped that he wasn’t alone in that—the vast majority of people went through their days in blissful ignorance of the real threat of the night.

 

That hadn’t made his day job any easier.  He still had terrorist threats to foil and Yakuza bosses to take down.  The governor expected him to do his job, and Steve couldn’t very well say to her, “Sorry, we were up all night pursuing a cabal of ancient evil.”

 

 _Cabal_. 

 

Steve could have lived a long, happy life without ever learning that word, never mind applying it to a group of superhuman, undead assholes.

 

Despite the sleep deficit and need to lie to his boss on occasion, the night gig has its perks.

 

“You really are a sadistic fuck, you know that?” Danny shouts over the hissing roar of the flamethrower.  The derelict warehouse the nest had made its home is threatening to come down around them, the walls groaning and shrieking like the ghosts of the martyred dead, and Steve’s moving through the air-bending heat with the calm complacency of a high school quarterback navigating the cafeteria at lunchtime.

 

“What?” Steve asks, faux-innocent, throwing Danny a grin as he strides through the flames, wielding a dragon’s-tongue of eradicating fire like water from a hose.

 

The last of the fanged crew makes her stand next to the saurian remains of a gutted bulldozer.  Steve drives her with short, targeted bursts until she’s trapped against the dozer’s big metal teeth, where Steve lights her up.

 

She twitches and writhes, her screams ear-piercing, until she disappears at last in a puff of ash.

 

Beside him, Danny grimaces, shaking his head, and then minces his way through the cascade of flaming wreckage to the nearest door.

 

“You’re welcome,” Steve says when they finish hacking up their lungs in the humid but blessedly clear air outside.

 

“For what?”  Danny’s voice is low and raspy, his eyes fever-bright in a soot-smudged face.

 

“I saved your life.”  It seems obvious to Steve.  “That last one was coming for you.”

 

“That last one was a pathetic newbie trying to scuttle into the shadows.” 

 

Danny speaks with the wealth of scorn a veteran heaps on a newly commissioned butterbar, and Steve bridles at it.  He’s never liked not knowing something and likes even less admitting to that ignorance.

 

Since for him the best defense is always a good offense, he says, “You feel sorry for that thing, Danny?”

 

He doesn’t like the pause Danny takes before answering.  He’s noticed it before, usually when Danny is deciding not what he feels but the degree to which he feels it.

  
Danny’s prim,“That _thing_ was someone’s daughter not too long ago,” suggests Steve had landed on his shit list.

 

Again.

 

He’s suddenly bleary-eyed, staggeringly exhausted from adrenaline let-down and the string of twenty-hour work days (if you counted “hunting” as work, which he does—mostly because thinking of it as sport seems wrong for all the reasons that disapproval was radiating off of Danny right now).

 

Sighing, Steve stretches his back out, hands over his head, damp air caressing his belly.  When he relaxes and looks at Danny to suggest they get out of the area before the fire department arrives, his partner has an expression Steve’s never seen on him before, and in the seconds it takes him to parse it, Danny seems to realize what he’s doing—staring at the place where a narrow band of skin had showed as Steve’s shirt rode up—and looks elsewhere.

 

Too late, though.  Steve’s seen that look and understands it now, just like he can’t unsee the vampires that walk among them.

 

The realization that Danny wants him is a much more pleasant discovery, though, and one that Steve would prefer to revisit in his dreams.

 

That he’d like to take Danny back to his house and follow that look to its logical conclusion is part of why he says, “Yeah, you’re right.  Sorry.”

 

Another reason for his rare apology is the pole-axed look Danny gets when he hears it.

 

The bonus motive is the tired but sweet smile it earns Steve.  That he can take down into his dreams too.

 

“I’m beat,” Steve says at the same time Danny offers, “Buy you a beer?”

They do a verbal do si do, talking over one another in their haste to agree, and only the distant wail of sirens breaks them free of it, herding them toward the car.

 

“Raincheck?” he asks when they’re ensconced in the thrumming quiet of the Camaro, leaving the chaos of lights and fire behind them.

 

“On the beer?”  Danny asks, suddenly coy.

 

Steve turns his eyes from the road to rake Danny with a deliberate look, up and down and back up.

 

“Yeah, sure.”

 

He’s pretty sure they both know he means a lot more than he’s saying.

 

Danny swallows visibly.  “Sounds good.”  Maybe the huskiness in his voice is smoke inhalation, but Steve chooses to think it’s got more to do with lust.

 

“That it does,” Steve agrees, turning his attention back to the road, weariness miraculously gone.

 

*****

 

“Do you have a fucking un-death wish?” Danny shouts as they take a corner on two wheels, which is what happens when Danny yells at Steve while driving at the same time.

 

Steve says nothing, though he thinks he manages a speaking look, and Danny puts both hands on the wheel, gripping it with a white-knuckled focus that Steve hopes he lives to regret.

 

When the next words come out so low that he strains to hear them over the blood pounding in his ears, Steve realizes that he might just have fucked up the one good thing he had in his life.

 

“I will not—Will. Not. _Steven_ —watch you throw your life away because you think yours is somehow worth less than anyone else’s—mine, or Chin’s, or Kono’s, or Duke’s, or Kamekona’s, or any other motherloving soul on this godforsaken hellhole of an island.  Do I make myself clear?” 

 

There’s nothing quiet about Danny’s voice by the time he reaches the question mark at the end.

 

Before Steve can work up the saliva to answer, Danny’s already moved on to part two of his rant.

 

“Maybe your mother died on you and your father sent you away thinking it was for your own good—and then died on you too—and maybe Joe Fucking White told you to eat every hurt until you learned to swallow all the fucking badness that comes your way, but I. Will. Not. watch you kill yourself.”

 

“I wasn’t trying—”

 

“Trying?  _Trying_?  You don’t _try_ , _Steven_.  You never _try_.  It’s effortless for you.  You don’t even think about it.  Not even for a second.  If there were an Olympic event for reckless endangerment of self, you’d take the gold every goddamned time.  Jesus, Steve.”

 

Danny’s voice drops to a whisper: “Does it matter to you at all that I love you?”

 

It does.  It _so_ does.  But Steve’s tongue is suddenly twice its size and stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his head feels heavy, so heavy, and things are growing grey at the edges of his sight, and he thinks he might be drooling on his shirt.

 

The next thing Steve knows, he’s in a cool, dimly lit room, stiff cotton sheets, light cotton blanket, and the distant susurrus of air conditioning and soft-soled shoes accompanying a closer, irregular rhythm that he identifies, when he opens his eyes to slits, as Danny snoring in a chair beside his bed.

 

He tries to say, “Danny,” but it comes out a moan, which serves the same purpose of waking his partner, who startles out of his seat, eyes fastening on Steve’s, the look of relief on his face so painful that it makes Steve’s eyes burn in sympathy.

 

“Hey,” Danny says, offering Steve a cup with a straw, saying, “Easy, take it easy,” as Steve tries to suck down its entire contents in one pull.

 

He winces as the tepid water hits his raw throat and then chokes when it slides down the wrong pipe.

 

An eon later, snotty and wet-cheeked and wheezing, he says, “Hey,” back, and Danny’s face lights up with a smile that makes Steve’s insides squirm.

 

Unless that’s the antibiotic they seem to be pumping into him by the bagful.

 

“What happened?” he asks, struggling to piece together events that are hazy, as if seen through red gauze.

 

“You don’t remember?”  Danny asks.

 

Steve shakes his head and then wishes he hadn’t.  There’s a distant throbbing at the back of his skull that tells him he’s going to regret when they take him off the good drugs.

 

“We were investigating the dock shooting—Irma Tanaki, you remember her?”

 

It’s a struggle, but Steve calls up an image of a petite, dark-haired young woman sprawled in a pool of blood and bilgewater belowdecks on a fishing trawler.  The stench—fish viscera, diesel fuel, and death—swims up through the murk of his memory and he dry-heaves.

 

“Easy,” Danny says again, offering him more water.  “We can do this another time.”

 

“No,” Steve rasps, resting his head back against the pillow, feeling weaker than he ever has.  “Please.”  It’s saved from sounding like begging only by virtue of his wrecked vocal cords.

 

“Max had done his prelim and sent the techs down to wrap her up.  We were standing on the docks talking to Kono about witness statements when you just…it’s like you just switched off, zoned out.  You looked back toward the warehouses, said something about needing to go, and then took off.  All the times I’ve chased after you behind a suspect, you’ve never run that fast.  I lost you in the container stacks.  I called after you, but you didn’t answer.  I thought I heard you shout…”

 

Danny wipes his mouth with a shaking hand.  “I came around a corner and there you were.  I thought at first that you were dead.  There was so much blood.  And when I realized where it came from…”  He shakes his head, denial and horror and shock all clear on his face.

 

Steve notices for the first time the bandage on his neck, and he brings his hand up instinctively to cover it, awash in a sudden wave of shame and confusion and…grief?

“Danny, I don’t—”

 

“Let me finish, Steve, please.  Please, just let me finish, okay?”

 

A cold fear is spreading in his gut, and he thinks he might retch again, but he whispers, “Okay,” and is terrifyingly grateful when Danny reaches out to take his hand, careful of the IV line but firm and warm and grounding.

 

“I thought you were dead, Steve.  And then I thought they’d… _gotten_ …you.  I thought I was going to have

to—”  Danny shakes his head, denial and fear and sorrow clear in his eyes and the shape of his mouth.

 

He fixes his eyes on Steve’s, face grim.  “If you make me do that to you…  If you make me,” but he can’t finish, his voice breaking, and he lets go of Steve’s hand to drop his face into his palms, shoulders shuddering.

 

Steve strains to touch him, can reach only the nape of his neck, exposed and tense.  “I’m right here, Danno.  I’m okay.  No one’s dying today.”

 

“That’d make a nice change from the usual,” Kono quips, coming through the door with a familiar yellow takeout bag in her hand.  Steve moves his fingers away from Danny’s neck.

 

She lifts the fragrant bag, says, “Butter shrimp, no garlic, and plain rice.  Easier on the stomach.”  Her eyes indicate the antibiotic drip.

 

“Thanks,” Steve says, wishing she’d leave and hating himself a little for it.

 

She puts the bag on the tray table, leans over to kiss him on the cheek—she smells of coconut oil and the heat of the sun trapped in her hair—gives him a half-hug, and then moves away.  “Glad you’re still with us, Boss,” she says, eyes cutting to Danny.

 

“You okay?” she asks him.  Danny’s red-eyed but meets her gaze and answers, waving off her concern.

 

“Yeah, sure.”

 

She doesn’t look like she believes him, but Steve watches as she lets it go.  “We’ve got a lead—Chin says ‘Hi,’ by the way—so I’m going to leave you to it.  Enjoy.”

 

And then she’s gone, taking some brightness out of the room with her.

 

They share a look, then, Danny’s eyes intense, Steve’s beginning to droop.  He wants to hold that look, wants to search Danny’s face until he can see their future in it, figure out what comes next for them.

 

“Hey, you should sleep,” Danny starts, but Steve stops him with a reaching hand, which Danny takes without hesitation.

 

“I love you, too,” Steve says, making himself look at Danny, watching the way he takes the confession.  There’s a cold hand clenched around his heart, and he thinks it might kill him if Danny doesn’t answer, if he takes it the wrong way, if Steve misread the situation and has just destroyed any chance the two of them might have had to salvage this whole clusterfuck and come out the other side still partners, never mind friends.

 

“I, uh, wasn’t sure you heard that part,” Danny says, using both hands now to hold Steve’s one.  Danny dips his head and looks up at Steve, suddenly shy.  His cheeks are flame red, and Steve wishes he could pull Danny onto the bed and hold him until his face was red for an entirely different reason.

 

“Hold that thought,” Danny breathes, eyes anything but bashful or innocent now as he reads the heat of Steve’s intentions in his face.

 

Steve clears his throat, and Danny lets him go to offer him another sip of water.  Steve covers Danny’s hand with his own and forgets to drink.

 

Then it’s Danny’s turn to clear his throat, pulling the cup away and setting it down.

 

“You want some of this?” he asks, indicating the food.

 

Steve’s stomach rebels at the idea.  “Naw, I’m good.  Why don’t you go, get some sleep, take a shower, whatever.  I’ll be alright.”

 

“You still haven’t told me who did this to you,” Danny answers, damn his sharp cop brain.

 

Steve stills, holding his breath so long he can feel his heart beating furiously against his lungs.  When he lets it out, he closes his eyes, not wanting to see Danny’s face when he realizes how much Steve has kept from him for the past six months.

 

“My father.  It was my father who did this to me.”


	2. Chapter Two

“So, let me get this straight—you’ve suspected that your father was a vampire pretty much from when we first told you about bloodsuckers, but you kept it from me—from us—this whole time?”

 

Steve doesn’t like the careful way Danny is enunciating.  He’s also not fond of how calm and quiet his voice is.  In his experience, Danny only slacks off the bluster when he’s deeply furious or truly terrified, and Steve’s pretty sure which it is that his partner is feeling right now.

 

This wasn’t the way he’d imagined the big reveal going.  He’d hoped to track his father down on his own, bring him in on the QT, assure himself of his father’s true intentions before unleashing him on the team.

 

Nowhere in his plans had Steve imagined they’d be sitting on his beach in the dark, side by side but miles apart, with Danny speaking in that too-calm tone and Steve feeling the world disintegrating beneath his feet.

 

They’d both agreed to wait until Steve was out of the hospital to have The Talk, as Danny had ominously dubbed it, and Steve should have welcomed the stalling time to figure out how to apologize.

 

Unfortunately, with the drug-haze, exhaustion, nightmares, and lack of privacy, Steve hadn’t had much wherewithal to put together a good excuse.

 

And anyway, what reasonable explanation would Danny accept for Steve’s lies of omission in this case?  _Sorry I told you I loved you before I got around to mentioning that my dad is an undead monster_?

 

“I know you’re not big on using your words, Steven, but this is the part where a person traditionally responds with some of them, preferably the truth this time.”  And there’s the famous Danny Williams snark but with an edge to it that Steve’s never heard directed at him before.

 

It’s the tone Danny saves for some lying scumbag handcuffed to the chair in interrogation.

 

Steve takes a breath, a swig of beer, another breath, blowing it out and setting the bottle down by way of buying himself another few seconds of time.

 

Danny shifts minutely in his chair, betraying his impatience.

 

“I thought I saw my father a week after we buried him.  I told myself I was imagining things—that it was grief playing tricks on my head.  But when you told me that vampires were real, I started thinking about that night again.  I’ve been looking for him ever since.  I didn’t tell you because…” 

 

Steve pauses to run a hand over his face.  He’s so tired he feels like gravity is pressing him into the chair, like even the act of inflating his lungs takes superhuman effort.

 

He risks a glance at Danny.  He’s unnaturally still, his eloquent hands flat on his thighs, his eyes pinned to the silver line of waves rolling in.

 

“I wanted to be sure it was my father.  And I didn’t know if he’d be—if I’d have to—”

 

Steve has lived for months with the horrifying possibility of having to kill his own father, but time hasn’t made it easier to accept, and he can’t finish the sentence.

 

Danny reaches out and puts his hand on Steve’s leg, just above his knee.  It’s a warm weight that somehow lightens the pressure on Steve’s chest.  He takes another deep breath, swallows around the hard lump in his throat, and goes on.

 

“I didn’t want to bring you into it—any of you.  If it turned out he was one of the bad ones, I didn’t want you to feel like you had to… _do_ anything…about it.  About him.”

 

“You’re an idiot,” Danny says, but there’s so much fondness in the observation that Steve feels hope opening him up, until his eyes are hot and he’s struggling again to breathe around the tightness in his throat.

 

“Steve, when are you going to get it through that thick skull of yours that we love you—we’re your family—and we’re not going to let you go through the hard shit alone anymore?”

 

When Steve lays his hand on top of Danny’s and Danny turns beneath the touch to lace their fingers together, something hot lances through Steve and crawls up his throat.  No matter how hard he clenches his teeth, he can’t keep the sob behind it, and he curls over their joined hands to try to stop it, to keep it from growing louder and turning into a scream.

 

It takes him an eternity to regain even a margin of control, and when he is enough himself again to recognize the susurrus of the surf and the weight across his shoulders, he realizes that Danny is on one knee between their chairs, straining at an awkward angle to hold Steve together.  It must be killing his knees, Steve thinks, straightening up and running his free hand across his face.

 

He feels hot and cold, chills sluicing through his guts, and he thinks he might be sick, but then Danny says, “Steve,” and he’s so close when Steve looks up, so close that even in the light of a half-moon, he can see the colors in Danny’s bright eyes, swimming behind unshed tears, and it’s nothing—not a breath, not a moment’s thought, nothing like hesitation at all—to lean those scant few inches and kiss him.

 

There is a sustained, brilliant second of tension, like the invisible suspension of time just before a wave begins to curl, and Steve is hanging there, waiting to see if he’s going to fly or drown, until Danny joins him, the gentlest return of pressure, and then gentleness gives way to urgency, and one of them makes a sound in the back of his throat, and Steve is on his knees, too, pulling Danny against him, thigh to thigh. 

Danny is warm, warmer than it’s possible for him to be, driving away Steve’s shivering, and then he’s shaking for a different reason because Danny has pulled his mouth away to suck a line of heat along Steve’s jaw, and Steve might be saying things he’ll later regret, but he can’t hear himself over the blood rushing in his ears.

 

Danny’s sharp teeth fasten on Steve’s neck, just above the bandaged wound, and Steve does cry out then, loud enough to wake the neighbors, and bows back under that assault, laying himself down, spreading his legs to let Danny between them. 

 

Danny presses him into the sandy grass, works a hand between them under the loose waistband of his pants, words of affection and love and desire spilling from his mouth, making Steve frantic with the need to touch Danny everywhere.

 

Danny’s hand is rough, his broad palm hot, his touch confident.  “Come on,” he’s chanting, “Come for me, Steve,” and Steve is choking on a sound, biting the meat of his own hand to keep from screaming as Danny takes him apart in one, two, three tight, perfect strokes.

 

Somewhere in his back-brain he registers that they’re totally exposed here, unarmed and vulnerable, but he can’t seem to care with Danny spread out like a heavy blanket over him, keeping him warm, keeping him safe and in one piece.  He presses kisses into the damp hair at Danny’s temple and feels the rumble of his voice against his own chest as Danny says, “Babe,” and starts to push himself up.

 

Steve manages the coordination to snake a hand between them, vaguely planning to reciprocate if he can get his muscles to obey.

 

But Danny says, “Shhhh,” and stops him, his fingers a hot bracelet around his wrist.  “You don’t have to do that.”

 

“I know I don’t _have_ to,” Steve says, his voice sounding rough and strange in his ears.  “I want to.”

 

“Steve,” he answers, his tone making Steve want to get their clothes off and start all over again.  “That’s not what I meant.”

 

It takes kind of an embarrassingly long time for Danny’s meaning to dawn, but when it does, Steve can feel the goofy smile stretching the underused muscles of his face.  “Really?”  It’s not gloating in his voice—it’s not.  He’s proud, sure, but not at Danny’s expense.

  
“Shut up,” Danny says, rueful but also pleased.  “I haven’t creamed my shorts since I was fourteen.”

 

Steve leans up to kiss him.  “Glad I have an effect.”

 

“Babe, you have no idea.”

 

“I have _some_ idea,” Steve corrects.  After all, it’s not only Danny’s pants that are sticky with cooling spend.

 

Eventually, the need not to be caught out damp with jizz by a nosy neighbor gives him enough strength to let Danny pull him to his feet.  They amble into the house, stopping to kiss in the living room, on the stairs, Danny on the step above him so that they’re eye to eye.

 

His breath hitches, and he feels a tickle behind his breastbone like he used to get when he ran too far too fast without a break.

 

“Shower,” Danny murmurs, lacing his fingers through Steve’s and leading him to the upstairs bathroom, where it’s the work of seconds to drop their damp, sandy clothes and step under the soothing drumming of the water.

 

“Bend down here,” Danny says, pooling shampoo in the palm of his hand.  Steve sighs at the first threading of Danny’s deft fingers through his hair.

 

Those same clever hands work soap over him, taking time in the secret places until Steve is loose-limbed and trembling, exhaustion warring with need.

 

Danny finishes with a squeeze to Steve’s half-hard cock, making him suck in a lungful of damp air.

 

“I think you need to put that away,” Danny says, but he’s pressing his lips to Steve’s throat as he says it, so the words lose some of their power to command.

 

Still, Steve is swaying on his feet, can feel the last of his energy shredding away, so he lets Danny towel him down and lead him to the bedroom, where he slides gratefully between the smooth, cool sheets and feels the bed dip, turning to watch Danny stretch himself out beside him.  Danny gives him a sleepy, happy smile, and Steve feels his heart kick and tighten.

 

He turns to put a hand on Danny’s chest, to feel the rise and fall of his chest and the steady beating of his heart.

 

“Babe,” Danny murmurs, leaning up to kiss him.  “Go to sleep.”

 

For the first time in more nights than Steve cares to remember, he feels the peace and promise of real rest steal over him, and the last thing he thinks before he tumbles into the cradling dark is how much he wants to wake up to Danny beside him.

 

*****

 

“So, your father wasn’t trying to kill you?” Chin asks.  Only a slight paling of his skin betrays his shock at learning that John McGarrett is a vampire. He seems to weather this storm the way he has all the tempests in his life, with a soothing equanimity that might be mistaken for dispassion by people who can’t be bothered to know him any better.

 

“Or turn you?” Kono adds, tone somewhere between protective and skeptical.

 

“No, I don’t think so.”  Steve has gone over what he can remember of that moment on the docks again and again, trying to read his father’s few words in every possible light. 

 

“I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when I saw him on the docks.  I ran to the spot where I’d seen him, and then something hit me from the side and I fell.  I hit my head hard enough that I was out for a couple of seconds.  When I came to, the thing was at my neck.  I tried to pry it off, but it was strong.”

 

The team nods, eyes wide with sympathetic fear.  They’ve all had occasion to witness the freakish speed of even the newest-made vamps.

 

“I thought I was dead for sure, and then it was just…gone.  I looked up, and my father was there, bending over me.  He said, ‘They’re watching us.  Stop looking for me.  I’m sorry,’ and then he was gone, too.  The next thing I knew, Danny was there.”

 

He leaves out the panic in Danny’s voice, the way he’d sounded like Steve was already dead, the struggle through the long corridor between towering stacks of shipping containers to the car, the longer drive, Danny reckless at the wheel in the way only Steve could make him.

 

“I don’t think he’d meant for me to see him at all, which is why the other vamp got the jump on me before my father could interfere.”

 

He doesn’t blame them for looking at him like he’s maybe engaging in uncharacteristic wishful thinking.  He can see it from their point of view—mom dead, sent away to military school, semi-estranged from his father and then all at once acquainted with him in an intimate and terrible way, listening to him die on the thready line of a sat phone.  For all that he doesn’t often indulge in introspection, Steve isn’t unaware of his personal history and the issues that history engenders.

 

He just prefers to deal with it by shooting bad guys and/or putting them in prison.

 

Still, his teammates probably think Steve would take his father any way he could get him, if only he could have him back.

 

“Look, I know what it sounds like,” he begins, but Chin holds up a hand, and Steve stops.

 

“We believe you, brah.”

 

“Yeah,” Kono confirms.  “We just want to know what you want to do next.”

 

“Well, I know what he’s _not_ going to do,” Danny supplies.

 

“Stop looking for him?” Chin and Kono say almost in unison.

 

They know him too well, and it chokes him up a little, in fact, a reaction he masks with faux irritation.

 

“Right now,” he says, emphasizing his enormous patience with their teasing, “we’re going to work the Tanaki case and see where it leads us.  Something brought my father to the docks last night—he had to know seeing me was a risk, and he took it for a reason.  I also don’t believe he would have bitten me if he weren’t being watched, which means at least one other person—or vampire—was there too.  Let’s find out who our mystery monster is and how Irma Tanaki fits into the picture.”

 

Kono agrees to re-interview the scant few witnesses in the area of the trawler at the vic’s estimated time of death while Chin does a deep-dive on Tanaki’s background.

 

Danny and Steve leave for the docks so that they can reexamine the scene. 

 

By mutual and unspoken agreement, they avoid the spot where Steve’s blood might still be attracting flies and zero in on the trawler where the victim’s body was found.  The scene had been preserved, yellow tape fluttering in the fishy breeze, and Steve marvels that it was only two days ago that they’d been called here.

 

The bilge is cramped and dark, the water heavy with oil and other things it’s better not to think about.

 

It stinks so badly that even Steve, inured to most of the awful odors that life in a confined metal space can expose him to, has to take shallow breaths and concentrate on not gagging.

 

Behind him, Danny’s already covering his mouth with his arm and complaining about the stench.

 

“So, Max thinks she was killed on board and dumped in the bilge to hide the evidence?”  Steve doesn’t need to ask; he’s read the file twice.  It’s something to say to keep him from remembering his father’s face twisted into a mask of vicious focus; cold, wet breath against his throat; sharp teeth tearing at the fragile skin there.

 

“Right.  Charlie tested samples of the bilge water to determine how much of her blood might have been present. He said it seems likely she bled out in the water.”

 

Steve does his best not to imagine her helplessness and terror, but the file photos have seared into his mind a vivid impression of her blue-white skin, empty eyes, and the shocking red of the congealed mess where her throat had once been.

 

“She was an accountant, right?” Steve asks, turning away to escape the fetid air, smelling it anyway clinging to his clothes as they make their way onto the deck, where rust roses bloom and spread.

 

“Yeah.”  Danny’s nose is wrinkled, and he’s edging away from Steve, confirming his suspicion that he’s going to need a shower and a change of clothes before lunch.

 

“What brings her down here at midnight on a Tuesday?” Steve asks, gesturing to the desolation all around them. 

Even mid-morning on a Friday, it’s quiet, the only activity centered a half-klick away where a big crane is slowly winching containers onto a ship. “Does this look to you like the kind of place where a business keeps its tax receipts?”

 

“Babe, this place doesn’t look like it does business at all,” Danny notes, which is a fair point and one that Chin will hopefully resolve for them.

 

“So, why was she here?  How did they get her to come?”  Everything about this case feels off.  It’s making Steve’s skin tight and itchy.  He doesn’t like it.

 

“Maybe she was cooking the books?”  Danny floats the question like he’s not sure he believes his own theory.

 

“So, you figure they blackmailed her, told her they’d turn her in to the cops if she didn’t do what they said?”

 

Danny shrugs.  He’s got his face scrunched up as he thinks it through.

 

“That doesn’t make sense.” Danny contradicts himself, his hands graceful as he explains.  “Why’d she come to a remote location if she knew her employer was unhappy with her.  Seems like that’s a meeting you’d want to have at a busy coffee shop in the middle of the morning rush.” 

 

Steve is nodding.  “Yeah.  Maybe there’s something in her financials or at work that’ll explain it.”

 

“Unless it was personal,” Danny speculates, looking around the trawler but with an expression that suggests he’s not really seeing it, gaze turned inward.

  
“Not exactly a romantic getaway,” Steve says, eyeing the boat deck critically, something in his sailor’s nature deeply offended by the state of her.

 

“Like you’d know,” Danny answers, the insult automatic, as natural for the two of them as breathing. 

 

Then his eyes widen a little and he glances up at Steve, who is trying not to remember the feeling of Danny’s clever hands all over him. 

 

He sees the moment Danny realizes what he’s said, sees the regret flash across his face—apparently, sex is going to interfere with their well-established bickering routine, and Steve’s not sure how he feels about that kind of censorship.

 

He waves a hand, dismissing the jibe.  “You’re right,” he agrees, getting them back on track. “I don’t think we’re going to get the answers we need here.  Let’s swing by my place, so I can clean up, and then pick up some lunch before heading back to the Palace.”

 

Steve isn’t thinking about anything more than getting the stench of fish guts and decomp out of his clothes and hair, but when he sees Danny’s tongue dart out and trace his lower lip, sees the way his eyes have gone a little hot, he realizes he might have been sending a different signal.

 

“I didn’t mean,” he starts, and Danny jumps in with, “No, of course not,” and then Steve is smirking—he can’t help it, Danny looks so wrecked just from thinking about him naked in the shower—and Danny is bumping him with his shoulder and muttering, “Shuddup.”

 

It feels good to be back on familiar ground with Danny, though Steve also notices the way just that casual touch makes his blood pound hard in his ears.  He tells himself it’s because he’s still down a pint from the other day, tells himself it’s the shock of his father’s attack.

 

The part of him that knows better remains thankfully silent as they drive back to Steve’s, and Danny makes a big noise about waiting on the lanai while Steve takes a three-minute shower and changes into clothes that don’t reek of death.

 

Another part—louder and more insistent—is disappointed that Danny doesn’t join him, a thought that leads to a slight delay while Steve works his cargo pants carefully over his body’s natural response to the image of Danny wet and naked on his knees in front of him.

 

*****

 

Whatever desire they feel for each other is crushed by the steamroller of the Tanaki case, Chin’s financial digging leading to a series of shell corporations, one of which matches information Kono has pried out of the one of the dock’s night security guards, who, it turns out, had been taking bribes from a couple of shady guys whose names—surprise, surprise—turn out to be aliases.

 

Several long nights swapping stake-out shifts lead at last to cornering one of the aforementioned shady types, which should work out, except Steve’s halfway through his interrogation when the guy freezes, eyes bugging out of his head, and makes choking noises.

 

He’s dead before they can even call for help.

 

Max reports that their initial suspicion of poison is incorrect.

 

“In fact,” Max says, leaning conspiratorially over the corpse’s Y-incision, “I believe we have a genuine case of Mastery here.”

 

By the way he says the word, Steve knows it means something more than he’d find in a dictionary, so he waits, arms crossed, letting his expression indicate that he is being way more patient than anyone has a right to expect.

 

“Can I assume by your stoic posture, Commander, that you are unfamiliar with the stages of Minion possession among vampire kind?” 

 

He can tell that Max is settling in for a lecture, and Steve feels his irritation level rise several notches, not only because they don’t have time for this shit but also because every time he thinks he’s no longer the new kid on the block, some new variable is introduced to the picture, and it screws up his perception until he can adjust for it.

 

Before he can answer Max, Danny says, “Sorry,” and he sounds it.  Steve spares him a look, catching the distress in Danny’s eyes.  “You’re so freakishly competent, I forget that you don’t know half this stuff.”

 

As apologies go, it’s sort of half-assed, but that’s how they roll, and anyway, Max is talking again.

 

“Minions”—and Steve’s sorry, but that has to be the worst nickname for a vampire familiar he’s ever heard, given the blockbuster summer kids’ movie.  He’s never not going to think of bananas when he hears the word Minions, no matter that the term apparently refers to people whose wills have been enslaved, to varying degrees, to a vampire master.

 

“The only way,” Max says, in a tone suggesting that it’s not the first time he’s said it.

 

Steve drags his attention back to the medical examiner.  “Sorry, Max.  I’m listening.”

 

Max nods, apparently mollified.  “Apology accepted, Commander.  As I was saying, the only way to break the hold a Master has over a Minion is to disrupt the cognitive connection between them.  Some work has been undertaken on the subject, but as you might imagine, such experiments must be done in absolute secrecy, which makes distributing the resultant studies perilous for most medical professionals.  Still, science knows no restrictions, and we shall eventually find a way to reverse the neurological damage such long-term connections cause.”

 

“So, what you’re saying is we couldn’t have saved that guy,” Danny interjects, clearly cutting Max off before he can continue his paean to intrepid cryptozoological researchers.

 

“That is what I said, Detective Williams.”

 

“And there’s no way to keep it from happening again if we catch this other Minion.”  The word comes hard to Steve, but he just about manages it with a straight face.  There’s nothing funny about a guy being ganked in rendition, especially if Steve isn’t the one responsible for the guy’s stopped heart.

 

“I’m afraid not, Commander.”

 

“Damn.”

 

“However,” Max goes on.  “You may be able to limit the effects of the Master’s control.  There’s a very promising study out of the University of Connecticut—”

 

“Max,” Danny warns.

 

“As I was saying, there is some evidence to suggest that if you play a certain subsonic frequency, it may disrupt the signals the Master uses.”

 

“Can you send that intel to Kono?”

 

“Consider it done, Commander.”

 

“Thank you, Max.  Oh, and is there any chance this could happen to us?  I mean, how does a Master make a Minion?”

 

“Why make it when Mattel sells ‘em for $9.95 plus tax at Walmart?” Danny asks, sotto voce, and Steve has to bite his cheek to keep from laughing.  Laughing over a corpse is a sign of burnout, he’s sure.  And anyway, Max is pretending Danny didn’t say anything, so Steve should too.

 

“Commander, while your military conditioning might predispose you to commands from a vampire you consider your superior, your moral compass and, if you’ll forgive my bluntness, natural proclivity to control your environment make you a less suggestible target for such an attack.”

 

“Good,” Steve says even as Danny says, “What about me?”

 

“One moment, Detective.  Commander, I believe there is one exception to my assessment of your suggestibility.  However, I hesitate to offer my concern, given the sensitive nature of the subject.”

 

Steve feels his stomach sink and knows where Max is going with this.

  
“You think if it were my father, I might be compromised.”

 

“Just so, Commander.  Your father has always been a person for whom you have the utmost respect.  You are naturally inclined to trust and obey him.  Given the nature of your relationship, you may be more…suggestible.”

 

“You’re saying if my father ordered me to do something awful, like—”  The image of Danny lying on dark, wet pavement with a hole in his chest and a look of betrayal on his face flashes through Steve’s mind, and he shoves it away ruthlessly—“like steal evidence or hurt someone…I might do it?”

 

“That is correct, Commander, assuming your father has already achieved Master status, which there is no way for us to ascertain at this time.  Therefore, it is my feeling that you should avoid direct contact with your father unless you have no other option.”

 

Steve swallows, trying to process what he’s hearing, wondering why no one has mentioned it before.

 

“I would have spoken to you sooner about this, Commander, but I have not had the pleasure of your company since you were released from the hospital.”

 

Steve really hates this particular learning curve, but he can’t fault Max for how steep it is.

 

“Thanks, Max,” Steve says.

 

“So?” Danny prompts, and Dr. Bergman turns to him with the deadpan expression he often wears when faced with the recalcitrant detective.

 

“I do not believe you are particularly vulnerable to a Master’s suggestion,” Max says.

 

“Well, that’s good,” Danny answers, giving Steve a superior look.

 

“Really?” Steve asks, genuinely surprised.  Given what he’s seen of Danny’s openness and what he knows personally of the size of his heart, he strikes Steve as a much stronger candidate for whammying than Steve might be.

 

“Indeed, Commander.  While your desire for control makes you less open to such suggestion, Detective Williams’ curmudgeonly nature likewise protects him to a degree.”

 

“So, because he never does what I ask him to without complaining for an hour, he’s less likely to be a target for a Master vampire?”  Steve smirks slowly and deliberately and delights in the way Danny flushes and screws his eyes up.  He does love baiting his partner.

 

“I believe that’s what I said, Commander,” Max says as he moves toward his office and away from the impending explosion in his morgue.

 

Despite Steve’s taunting, Danny doesn’t bite.  Instead, his irritation morphs into fondness as Steve watches, and the warm look in his eyes makes something in Steve’s stomach flip wildly.

 

“What?” he says, feeling suddenly exposed.

 

“Nothing,” Danny says in a tone that always means the opposite.

 

“C’mon, what?” Steve pushes.

 

“You heard the doc:  My complaining?  It’s a defense mechanism.  It keeps me from being vampire chow.  So, you can’t call me on it anymore, unless you want me to be some Master’s bitch.”  It’s Danny’s turn to look smug, which he’s managing with his usual flair.

 

Steve holds Danny’s eyes for a moment he lets stretch, until he’s forgotten Max in the next room or even the body on the table beside them.

 

Then he says, dropping his voice, “There’s only one person whose control I want you to be under,” and he lets his earlier fantasy about Danny on his knees in the shower show on his face.

 

Danny flushes, tongue darting nervously to ghost along his lower lip, and Steve wants to chase that tongue back into his mouth, shove him up against the wall and see how far he can take things.

 

An ostentatious clearing of the throat from the outer office reminds Steve that he’s skirting the very limits of propriety and has already left professionalism far behind.

 

“So,” he says in his brusque Commander’s voice, “We should see about Master-proofing the team before we follow any leads into dark alleys.”

 

“Sounds like a plan,” Danny concurs, though he’s a little breathless when he says it, which is honestly pretty gratifying.

 

“Thanks again, Max,” Steve says as they breeze through the office to the door.

 

“Commander.  Detective.”

 

Out in the car, Danny’s tight grip on his wrist stops him as he’s putting the keys in the ignition, and Steve turns to see what the problem is.

 

Later, he’ll claim Danny only got the drop on him because he wasn’t expecting the move, but that’s bullshit, and they both know it.

 

Danny’s on him in a heartbeat, and Steve’s ready, willing, and able, consequences, witnesses, and setting be damned.

 

Danny’s got his tongue down his throat, wringing hungry sounds out of Steve that he will also later deny, and is gripping Steve’s hardening cock through his suddenly uncomfortable cargo pants when Danny’s elbow strikes the horn.

 

He’s back across the gear shift, wild-haired and panting, before Steve notices the absence of his weight pressed against him.

 

“Don’t do that again,” Danny orders, voice wrecked, and Steve can only summon up enough presence of mind to nod dazedly before turning the keys in the ignition and moving his hand—not-shaking, definitely _not-_ shaking hand—to the gearshift.

 

Privately, he thinks he’s not making any promises, but miles later he manages, “Sorry.” 

 

“No, you’re not,” Danny shoots right back, absolute in his certainty, and, well, yeah, Steve’s not sorry, but he’s also not so much of a dick as to keep pulling that particular trick while they’re on the job—or in public—or, actually, anywhere where they can’t get immediately naked together.

 

“Stop smirking, you smug bastard,” Danny grouses a minute later.

  
“I’m not!” Steve protests, though he totally was, and all is right with the world, at least for the next few minutes.

 

*****

 

Two impossibly long days later, Steve is sitting in his truck thinking about driving home, an activity that has taken more focus than he’d like to admit.  He’s so tired, he can feel it in his scalp, and his usual oo-rah Navy machismo is doing nothing to get him to turn the key in the ignition and start the long trip home.

 

Even telling himself that’s where his bed lives provides zero incentive.

 

He thinks he might just stretch out in the back on a beach towel and hope it doesn’t rain.

 

The tap on the window startles him, and his gun has cleared the holster before he realizes it’s Danny.

 

“You need a ride?” he says without preamble.  He looks as bad as Steve feels, blue shadows under his eyes, the corners of his mouth turned down even more than usual.  But he’s holding his keys up, and there’s a look in his eyes that says he might be hoping Steve says yes.

 

It can’t possibly be that he’s thinking about getting lucky:  Steve’s pretty sure neither of them could get it up with a dozen Viagra and a hydraulic lift.  Once upon a time, even the thought of being too tired for sex would have shamed Steve into proving himself wrong.

 

Now, he’s confident enough in his masculinity—or comfortable enough with his age—that he can be appalled at the very thought of even trying.

 

Still, letting Danny drive him home is way better than sleeping in his truck bed, so he says, “Sure,” and then, “Thanks, Danny,” as he slides into the Camaro’s passenger seat.

 

If Danny answers him, he doesn’t hear it.

 

A gentle poke wakens him as they pull up in front of his house.

 

“Hey,” he slurs, bleary-eyed and only half-awake.  “You should come in.”

 

A short huff of air passes for a laugh.  “Nice try, but even your SEAL ass is too tired for the horizontal boogie.”

 

“I don’t have to be a SEAL to tell that you’re too tired to drive yourself home.  Besides, you’d only have to come back for me in the morning, since I left my truck at the Palace,” Steve answers, his brain having cleared some of the cobwebs thanks to his nap.

 

“Gotta say, that’s not the most romantic come-on I’ve ever heard,” Danny answers, but his voice has that warm fondness, and his mouth is turned up at the corners with a certain shy pleasure at being asked to stay the night.

 

Glad he’s too tired to overthink it, Steve says, “C’mon,” and leads them inside, where he does the usual perimeter sweep while Danny leans against the wall at the bottom of the stairs, rolling his eyes at Steve’s vigilance.

 

Then they’re upstairs—a Herculean effort—and toeing off their shoes and setting their badges and guns and phones on the nightstands to either side of the bed. 

 

There’s a moment of quiet as they realize at the same time how domestic it all feels, a moment Steve breaks by stripping himself with his usual military efficiency while Danny takes a little longer getting out of his own clothes.

 

They have another moment of not-quite-awkward hesitation before climbing in on their respective sides.  Steve has a second’s doubt about whether he should reach for Danny, a doubt Danny puts to rest by sliding his hand across the distance between them to take Steve’s hand.

 

It should feel silly or stupid, Steve thinks, but it doesn’t—that single point of contact, the warm strength of Danny’s touch, settles the last of Steve’s sudden misgivings about the unexpected intimacy of going to bed together to actually sleep.

 

He closes his eyes, thinking about waking up again with Danny beside him, and the thought sends a thrill through him that’s strong enough to keep him awake until Danny’s slow and even breathing lulls Steve to sleep too.

 

*****

 

Part of Steve is deeply pragmatic; though he’s constantly advising Danny to stop being so negative, the truth is that Steve has a firm grasp on the realities of life, and those realities?  Well, they frequently suck, and not in the oh-baby-that-feels-good kind of way.

 

This thing with Danny—this improbable, hot-knife-through-the-heart feeling he gets whenever Danny smiles at him—it’s dangerous for so many reasons, not the least of which is that if things go south, so does their partnership.  And while Steve might be able to live without Danny in his bed, he doesn’t think he’ll make it without Danny in his work and in his life (which is, basically, work anyway).

 

These thoughts intrude only after Danny has sucked a screaming orgasm out of him, however, so the panic is significantly muted by the post-blow-job euphoria.

 

Danny is lying next to him, still panting, cock hard and red, a pleasantly thick, slightly curved handful, and Steve feels a stirring heat in his core that signals his willingness to go another round, even if his flesh is still protesting his weakness.

 

“C’mere,” he murmurs, tugging Danny closer by a hand on his wrist.

 

“I get any closer, we’re going to have to exchange vows,” Danny quips, but he straddles Steve a moment later, weight settling hot and heavy on Steve’s thighs.

 

A sharper zing of excitement races through him.  The idea of being held down never appealed to him before now, and Steve wonders if he’s a fool for planning the next time and the time after that and all the things he wants to do with and to Danny.

 

He dismisses his practical inner voice and says, “C’mere,” again, getting a grip on Danny’s fine, tight ass and pulling.

 

Danny’s eyes widen, and he breathes “Really?” with such heartbreaking hope that Steve has to swallow a sound.  No one should be that grateful for being taken care of.

 

“C’mon,” Steve urges, pulling him closer, and Danny swallows visibly and climbs carefully over Steve’s shoulders until his cock bobs directly in Steve’s face.

 

This close, Steve’s enveloped in the scent of Danny’s arousal—seed, sweat, the fundamental muskiness that signals his maleness.  His thighs are hot and so close that the thunder of Steve’s own blood is amplified in his ears.

 

He swallows his sudden nervousness—he feels a little trapped, completely at Danny’s mercy to know when to pull back and how far to thrust.

 

Steve licks his lips, says, “Danny,” in an alien voice, as if his throat has already been fucked to roughness, and Danny bites off a sound and slides the fat, slick head of his cock between Steve’s parted lips.

 

The next sound is louder, a long, low moan, which Steve echoes around Danny’s cock.  Danny makes a shallow thrust, sliding thick and heavy on Steve’s tongue, and Steve relaxes, opening his throat, swallowing around the initial discomfort, quelling the instinctual fear of being suffocated.

 

Danny says, “Steve,” with a desperate reverence that makes Steve moan again.  Hot tears leak from the corners of his eyes, and they have nothing—nothing—to do with discomfort and everything to do with trust.

 

Danny’s the one shaking, but it’s Steve coming apart here, and when Danny comes, a final, sustained thrust, a shuddery cry, a broken, “Steve, babe,” as he slides free, Steve feels like he might never be whole again, feels a clutching coldness in his chest, and then Danny is beside him, stretching out over him, kissing his closed eyes, the loose redness of his well-fucked mouth, the hollow of his gasping throat, the space over his heart where the heat of Danny’s love cracks the ice and drives it away.

 

He feels like an open wound.  Even the early morning air from the window is too much on his sensitive skin.  He hasn’t felt this way since he last had a fever, crammed in the back of a truck with his team, grateful that the space is too small for them because it keeps him upright.

 

But Steve’s not sick this time; there’s no fever here, just the sheer enormity of what he’s just done—what he’s just allowed to be done to him.

 

That he wants more, wants it all, wants Danny to come inside him so deep, to drive him open, make him wild with it—that’s secondary to the feeling that Danny has already crawled into his ribcage and taken up permanent residence there.

  
“Steve, you’re thinking so loud they can hear you at the Palace,” Danny says, spreading his warm, strong fingers open on Steve’s chest, as if keeping him from floating away or breaking into a thousand pieces.

 

Steve runs his hand down Danny’s arm, feels the strength and solidity of him, and he wants to believe that it’s as easy as this—Danny’s here and will always be here.  
  


  
But the people he loves leave him all the time. 

 

He presses a kiss to Danny’s temple, unwilling to put into words what he’s feeling, to loose the curse upon the world or, worse, sound like a pathetic loser.

 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Danny says after a minute, and those words, simple as they are, obviously a promise in the way Danny says them, at last allow Steve to take a long, slow breath, letting go of his fear as he exhales.

 

Steve can hear the comfort of the waves breaking endlessly against the shore, can feel the steadiness of Danny’s breathing against him.  The air smells of saltwater, sweat, and sex.  It’s a heady combination.

 

“I love you,” Steve says, and the words feel enormous coming out of him, the pressure in his chest swelling until he thinks he might choke.

 

Danny leans up and looks down at him, a wide, bright smile breaking across his face.

 

“I love you, too, you big idiot,” Danny says, and kisses him long and slow and easily, like they’ve been doing this all their lives and will do it for at least another lifetime after this. 

 

Steve knows he’s a fool for hoping they get that much time together, but for now, he puts away the part of him that’s always calculating margins and lets Danny love him.


	3. Chapter Three

When it finally comes, the moment is almost anticlimactic.

 

They’ve been chasing shadows and rumors for months, working double shifts in between daylight cases to try to track down the Master at the heart of Hawaii’s undead crime wave.

 

Irma Tanaki’s murder has become a footnote in a plot so convoluted that it takes a flow chart to keep track of all the details.

 

Danny’s car has suffered bullet-holes, flat tires, dents in the shape of human bodies; Steve’s truck bed has been set on fire.

 

Chin’s motorcycle is still in the shop.

 

After the third incident involving a motor vehicle, Kono has refused to bring her car to work, period.

 

They’ve been shot at, sideswiped, blown up (once), attacked by dogs (twice), and, in one memorable instance, sprayed with fertilizer made from liquified guano.

 

To say that Five-0 is done with all this (bird)shit is to engage in egregious understatement.

 

So, it should feel like some kind of victory to be standing in a warehouse surrounded by slavering Minions and staring down Honolulu’s purported Master vampire, who goes by the unlikely street name of Jade.

 

“Jade?  Really?” Danny is drawling, and Steve can’t blame him for the disbelief. 

 

“I mean, it _is_ a stripper name,” he says, giving Danny a smirk.  He keeps the Master in sight in his peripheral.

 

“Totally,” Danny concurs.  “Also, does Barry Manilow know you raid his closets?”

 

The oversized collar and wide lapels are one thing, but the platform shoes and polyester, groin-hugging flare-bottoms are a whole other level of ugly.  It’s hard to take an arch-nemesis seriously when he dresses like a Bond villain from the Roger Moore era.

 

If Jade is annoyed by their banter, he gives no sign of it.  His dark eyes glitter in the harsh light of a single overhead florescent swinging on its chains.  The motion creates a shadow play that has Steve resisting the urge to duck and cover.

 

To Jade’s left, a hulking Minion with an avid stare lurches forward like a Romero extra, and Steve drills him neatly between the eyes.  He drops like a sack of dirty hotel sheets—a heavy thud and then nothing.

 

“Call them off,” Steve says, and Jade’s lips curve into a feral smile just before the Minions move en masse.

 

There are an even dozen of them left, and they’re carrying a variety of weapons.  Danny and Steve take out a gunman a piece, but a third gets off a shot that nails Steve in the biceps, spinning him off target as he goes to kill a fourth guy with an Uzi, of all things.

 

“Danny!” he shouts, catching movement to their right, and Danny pivots and kills the guy before the rest of the Minions are on them, and they’re forced to abandon their guns for close contact weapons.

 

He hears Danny hiss, feels him judder hard against Steve’s back—“You okay?” he asks, sinking his knife into a sixth guy, this one no older than Kono.

 

“Peachy,” Danny grunts, and Steve hears the solid percussion of a fist landing home.

 

“Let’s move,” Steve says.  They shuffle-jog to a stack of crates bathed in deeper shadows, putting their backs up against the splintery wood and keeping space between them to maneuver.

 

Somewhere, Danny’s picked up a crowbar, which he swings with lethal efficiency.  Steve’s left arm is on fire, and he’s starting to feel the blood loss as his elevated heartrate pumps it out of him, but there are still five Minions on them, and he can’t take the time to wrap it.

 

Danny takes out number five while Steve closes with number four, landing a gut-punch to double the guy over so he can get his right forearm around the Minion’s neck, which he snaps with a brutal, efficient twist, grimacing at the wet crack of it.

 

These are someone’s sons and daughters, Steve thinks, kicking a female Minion in the chest and then using her hair to sling her into a forklift.  She strikes the side with an unholy clang and slumps to the ground, dying or dead already.   
  


  
He turns at Danny’s shout, sees two Minions moving in on him, sees the hand that held the crowbar is empty and cradled protectively against his chest.

 

Steve’s a dozen feet away, feet moving sluggishly, air dragging at his feet as he tries to close the distance, get to Danny, save him.

 

One of the Minions goes for Danny’s throat, grappling with him while the other comes up behind him, teeth bared, intentions obvious.

 

Steve shouts, brings up his gun, hesitates—they’re both too close to Danny to risk a shot.

 

He barrels into the biter, taking him down, as Danny’s knees give out and he starts to fall.  Steve’s got his own problems, the Minion beneath him gnashing his teeth, using Steve’s ears like handles, desperate to get Steve’s throat close enough to rip through.

 

The guy’s got tobacco-stained teeth too dull for such work, but he worries at Steve’s collarbone, which hurts like a motherfucker.

 

Steve grunts and gets his gun hand between them at the groin level in a parody of intimacy he shatters when he pulls the trigger.

 

The Minion gasps, releasing him with a shriek, and Steve shoves himself to his feet, weaving a little, bleary-eyed and dizzy, to see Danny on the ground, unmoving, the Minion on top of him red-lipped and grinning.

 

Despite the greying edges of his vision, Steve puts a bullet in the guy’s gory teeth, stumbles to drop by Danny’s side and feel through the red ruin of his throat for a pulse.

 

It’s there, strong and sure, and Danny’s blue eyes squint up at him as he says, “I’m okay,” and tries to sit up.

 

Theatrical clapping freezes them both, the Master somehow stupidly forgotten in the onslaught of other, lesser enemies.  It’s a mistake they’ll never make again.

 

“Come to me,” he says, and Danny makes a rude noise and rolls his eyes before slapping Steve on his flank to get him up and moving.

 

Steve makes a sincere effort, but he can’t get up.  He’s on his knees, swaying, fighting nausea and a powerful need to lie down and sleep.

 

“Hey, hey, no, babe,” Danny says, gripping Steve’s shoulder and pressing where one of the Minions had bitten him.  Pain arcs through him and he hisses, throwing Danny a betrayed look.  “Stay with me.”

 

Steve wants to say that he’s not going anywhere—he’s never going to leave Danny.

  
“That’s sweet,” Danny says, “But now’s not the time,” and Steve realizes he must have said that last part out loud.

 

“Come to me,” Jade says again, and Steve sways toward him, feeling a tug in his gut that has nothing to do with blood loss.  “Yes,” Jade says, smiling, and Steve feels warm inside and out, pain fading in the stream of approval he feels washing over him.

 

A sharp slap snaps his head back to Danny, who’s winding up for another go.

 

Steve’s reflexes aren’t so slow that he doesn’t stop Danny, saying, “Ow!” and glaring at his unrepentant face.

 

“Don’t make nice with the master vampire,” Danny chides, and then he grinds the heel of his free hand into Steve’s bullet wound.

 

“Hey!” he shouts, jerking away, overbalancing and winding up on his ass on the cold warehouse floor.

 

While they’ve been playing Three Stooges, Jade has materialized not six feet away, his wide, black eyes probably mesmerizing to two other guys.  As it is, Steve is gritting his teeth against the throbbing agony of his combined wounds and Danny’s tender loving “care,” and Danny seems intent on making Steve scream some more, and not in any way he’d remotely enjoy.

 

From the darkness beyond the shadows, groans and screams indicate that a few of the Minions have survived.  Closer up, it’s quiet except for their breathing.  Jade silently closes the gap between them, reaching for Danny as Steve brings his gun up in slow motion, knowing the bullets won’t do a damned thing to stop what’s about to happen.

 

He fires anyway, the sound reverberating through his skull, and the world starts to go grey at the edges.  “Danny!” he croaks, all the warning he can manage, and then he’s being lifted in strong arms, borne away from the cries of agony and the weight of his own body.

 

*****

 

“Easy, Steve, I’ve got you,” his father is saying, and Steve’s seven years old with a broken arm from his board landing on him and a concussion from his contact with the water.  His stomach is full of saltwater, and he heaves, his father cradling him, saying, “I’ve got you.  Let it out.  Just let it out.”

 

When he pries his eyes open, it’s not the blazing blue Hawaiian sky that greets him but a dim outline of his father, who is, indeed, cradling Steve, carrying him effortlessly away from the scene of carnage in the warehouse.

  
“Danny,” he says—or thinks he says, he’s not sure this isn’t all some fucked-up dream—and his father says, “He’s fine.  The others have him, and Jade is dead.”

 

It should alarm him, that his dead father is carrying him away from his team, his friends—away from Danny most of all.  But Steve is bone-weary, bleeding out, and so fucking tired of things being hard.  Just once, he’s going to let someone else carry him.

 

His father puts him down gently on a pile of pallets in a corner of the warehouse that’s dimly lit by a blurry skylight that appears to be a million miles away.  Steve’s focus is going in and out, and he feels like he’s alternately floating and heavy as lead.

 

“Dad,” he tries to say, and his father leans over him, mouth open, teeth long and gleaming in the grey, indistinct light.

 

As his face descends, growing enormous in Steve’s narrowing sight, he remembers, vaguely, that he shouldn’t let his father near his throat.

 

Then his father’s mouth, cold and demanding, is sucking at the wound on his collarbone, and Steve is writhing with the twin sensations of disgust and pleasure.

 

“Dad?” he says, and he’s ten years old, walking in on his father cradling a rocks glass in one hand and a revolver in the other.

 

“It’s alright, Steve.  Go back to sleep,” his father’s saying, but Steve is afraid, cold in his belly, a cold that seeps through every part of him but especially his arm, which he thinks he remembers hurting.

 

“Dad?” he says again, and he’s fifteen, being told that he’s being sent away.  He’s colder still, his heart freezing in his chest, his tears like ice as they slide down his numb cheeks.

 

“Dad?” he shouts—tries to shout—through the phone, trying to make sound around his heart throbbing in his throat, hearing the gunshot on the other end and knowing that the inevitable has finally come, leaving him bereft of anyone who might have told him that he’s worth being proud of.

 

This time, though, his father isn’t gone, and Steve knows there’s something wrong with that, but he’s having trouble recalling where he is, _when_ he is, and the uneasiness is slowly being suffocated by a blanket of comfort.  He doesn’t need to care about anything:  His father has him.

 

The pain in his collarbone has receded, the pain in his arm, too, and he’s lethargic, unable to work up the energy for words.

 

His father is hovering over him, saying, “It’s okay, son.  You’re going to be fine,” but there’s something wrong with his face, and it takes Steve a long, long time to see the blood on his lips, the high splash of color on his cheeks, and the lethal teeth gleaming pinkly in the dim light from overhead.

 

“No,” Steve says, and it’s a feeble protest, but his father backs off, hands up as if to say, _Okay, have it your way, Champ_.

  
_Champ_.  Memory scythes him open, and he recalls Victor Hesse and his father’s false bravado and that strange endearment from a man who’d been sparse on even the harsher words in the time Steve had known him.

 

A red toolbox.  Pictures and letters and artifacts of another life, one Steve had not been allowed to get to know.

 

“You’re dead,” he says, and his father takes a step away, dissolving slowly into the deeper shadows beyond the reach of even Steve’s usually keen vision.

 

Then Danny is there instead, like the world’s freakiest magic trick.  He’s bloodied, pale and sweating but whole, and he’s saying, “It’s okay, Steve, I’ve got you.  It’s okay.”

 

His hands are warm and heavy where he touches Steve, pressing against wounds that should hurt, but they don’t because Steve hasn’t got anything left to give, not even pain, which is a constant in his experience.

 

“Hey, Babe, it’s okay. You’re okay,” Danny is saying, maybe to convince himself more than Steve, but Steve decides to believe him and surrenders, letting go of the fraying threads of contact with the real world and slipping under the soft gray influence of oblivion.

 

*****

 

“You get your card punched?” Danny asks as he wheels Steve by the nurse’s station on the way to the elevator that will take him down to where Danny has pulled the car around.  “Sixth visit is half-off,” he continues, like he’s hilarious or something.

 

“Ha-ha,” Steve says, rolling his eyes for the benefit of a giggling nurse’s aide named Mandy, who’d taken better care of Steve than Steve had probably needed.  (Steve hadn’t complained because of the way her appearance in Steve’s room inevitably made Danny’s face pucker like he’d just taken a big bite of pineapple pizza.)

 

Danny deliberately jostles the chair getting it into the elevator, banging Steve’s elbow against the doorframe.

  
“Ow,” Steve says, and Danny’s the one rolling his eyes at Mandy now, saying, “Such a baby.”

 

She giggles at that, too, the traitor.

 

The wrangling for who gets to drive is so familiar that it actually makes Steve a little wet-eyed, and that, if nothing else, tells him he should let Danny do the honors.

 

Danny’s steady hands and stolid driving go some way to letting Steve relax in the passenger seat.  The rest he chalks up to blood loss and the intendant exhaustion, and he barely protests Danny’s teasing about being an old man when he wakes Steve up in front of his house.

 

“Coming in?” he asks, rubbing sleep from his eyes and trying to remember if he has any Longboards in the fridge.

 

“That’s a stupid question,” Danny grouses, but he says it like he loves Steve, and that, too, makes Steve’s eyes feel hot.

 

He’s been gone less than twenty-four hours—the hospital had only kept him for twelve after they’d stitched his collarbone and arm and topped him up with a pint of blood—but his house feels stuffy, the air stale like it gets when he’s been away for a long time.

 

“Sleep, food, or shower?” Danny asks, and Steve thinks it’s a pity he can’t have all three at once.  He wants to be clean and fed and asleep with Danny weighing down the mattress beside him.

 

He stands there for longer than it should take to think his way through to an answer, and Danny waves a hand toward the stairs.  “Go get a shower.  I’ll order something.  What are you up for?”

 

Steve takes stock of his stomach’s condition.  “Sandwiches?”

 

“You got it, Babe.”  Danny moves around him, letting his hand drift across Steve’s lower back.  The heat of his hand through Steve’s shirt makes him shiver.

 

It takes him two tries to say, “Thanks, Danny,” and he means for a lot more than the ride and the food, but Danny just waves him toward the stairs, already searching through his phone for the sub shop they both like.

 

It shouldn’t make Steve feel alone, going up the stairs to his own room, stripping down, showering in the familiar bathroom, but it does.

 

He wonders if it’s possible that his father broke him somehow, and the memory of his father’s mouth on his torn skin, the tug-of-war between revulsion and desire that sensation had caused in him, makes him double over, retching hard enough that he feels something pop in his collarbone, and when he’s able to open his eyes once more, it’s to see a thin stream of pink water making its way toward the drain.

 

He washes himself off, tells himself it’s got to be some built-in vampire thing, swears to himself he’s never, ever going to ask anyone— _especially_ Danny. 

 

He tries not to think about his father’s motives:  Was he trying to kill him or heal him?  Was the latter even possible?  
  


Steve doesn’t know and doesn’t think he has it in him right now to find out.

 

He finishes in the shower, suddenly anxious to get back downstairs where Danny is, wanting his company, a sense of his presence in the house.

 

His hair is still sending a trickle of wet down the back of his shirt when Steve comes down to find Danny out on the lanai with a beer.

 

“None for me?” he asks, eyeing the Longboard Danny must have dug out of the back of Steve’s fridge.

 

“Meds,” Danny says, taking an ostentatious swig. 

 

 _Dick_.

 

Steve eases himself into the other chair and closes his eyes, letting his mind fasten on the sound of Danny swallowing and breathing and existing only feet away.  It helps a little to ease the tension behind his breastbone and the uneasy twinge where he’d popped a stitch throwing up.

 

“Do you think he was trying to kill you or heal you?” Danny asks, shattering the quiet, and Steve swallows hard and tries to ignore the panic response turning his empty guts to ice.

 

“I don’t know,” he answers, his voice rough, like he hasn’t used it in a while—or like he’s been screaming.  There’d been this time in Sudan when he’d been captured by a rebel faction—a grandiose name for a ragtag group of felons and assholes living in squalor on the edge of a desert—and they’d used a flog made from the split branch of a cedar against the soles of his feet.  Nothing he’d been able to do—none of the SERE training, none of the other tricks of the trade he’d picked up from buddies over the years—had been able to keep the sounds behind his teeth.

 

The rebels had laughed.

 

When the rest of the team had liberated him, Steve had been shocked and ashamed to learn that he’d only been captive for six hours.  It had felt like a lifetime.

 

The memory he’s trying to suppress of his father leaning over him, telling him he’s okay, putting his mouth to his wounds—it feels like it’s on a nightmare delay, everything attenuated so the agony and the strange sensation of pleasure seem to go on and on.

 

“Hey,” Danny says, squeezing Steve’s wrist.  “Where’d you go?”

 

He wants to say _I’m right here_ , except he’s not.  Half of him is strung up by the wrists under a canvas tarp where the ground is saturated with diesel and his feet are on fire, and the other half is trying not to make a sound as his father sucks on his bleeding flesh.

 

“Steve,” Danny says, and he’s on his knees beside the chair, grip on his wrist almost painfully tight, eyes wide with worry.

 

“I’m okay,” he gruffs out, but he’s not—he’s really, really not—and Danny scoffs and says, “Uh-huh,” in a tone that denies Steve even the dubious cover of his unconvincing lie.

 

A doorbell rings distantly, and Steve recalls that he’s on his own lanai and that Danny had ordered food for them, food he doesn’t think he can stand to smell, never mind eat. 

 

Danny makes no move to answer the door, and Steve says, “I’ll be fine for five minutes, Ma,” and summons up a ragged suggestion of a smile.

 

Danny huffs his disbelief but gets up with a wince as impatient knocking starts up.  “Just…stay here, okay?”

 

Steve wonders where Danny thinks he’s going to go—it’s his own damned house, for fuck’s sake—but he says nothing, too tired to argue even if it would restore a sense of normalcy.  He doesn’t like how fraught everything feels, like Danny’s waiting for him to break, and Steve himself is worried about obliging him.

 

To his credit, Danny comes back without the food but with two beers, one of which he gives to Steve without comment.

 

Steve offers him a wan smile and takes the Longboard, downing half of it in one long swallow.

 

Danny’s eyes are on him when he looks back up, and he says, “What?”

 

“You going to tell me what’s eating you alive, or am I going to have to guess?  Trust me when I tell you my imagination can come up with some pretty horrendous shit, so you’re better off just swallowing your stupid tough-guy pride and telling me.”

 

He has no doubt that Danny could work his way around to the truth; there’s no one who knows Steve better, a thought that should scare the shit out of him, except he’s too tired and nauseated and terrified of other things to let that little fact bother him.

 

There’d been a guy on his team who was fond of saying, “Only the shit you let in can get to you.”  He’d been killed in a door-to-door action on a compound in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan’s notorious Paktika Province.  In the dark watches of the following nights, Steve had wondered what Katz had let in besides the bullet that had killed him—if he’d had time to be afraid before he’d bled out in the goat dung and road dust where he’d fallen.

 

For the most part, Steve had avoided the gung-ho hypermasculine horseshit that got shopped around, like that he wasn’t supposed to feel anything.  He’d learned long before he got to the SEALs how to compartmentalize, to put the ugliness and terror away for later, when he could drag it out and beat it into some kind of submission or drink it into oblivion with Freddie and the guys.

 

This time, though, he can’t seem to find a door strong enough to keep what he’s feeling behind it, and that’s making his hands shake and his breath come short in a way that only increases his anxiety.  If he can’t use the tried and true methods, he’s afraid he might lose it entirely.

 

“Babe, if you don’t want to talk to me, please tell me you’ll talk to someone—maybe Kono?”  


Steve’s already shaking his head by the time Danny gets to the end of the sentence, but he says, “No,” vehemently when Danny mentions Kono’s name.  Steve knows she’s strong enough to carry the weight of what he’s feeling, and that’s exactly the problem—she’d carry it without a word of complaint, and he couldn’t bear to watch that.

 

“Then who, Steve?  Who?  Because it’s obviously not me,” and Danny sounds like he’s trying with a superhuman effort not to make this about him, but Steve knows he’s hurt—how could he not be?  They’re supposed to be lovers now, and they were partners long before they got into bed together.  Danny’s job is to literally have Steve’s back, and Steve’s not letting him do that for him.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he can’t look at Danny, can’t see the flash of pain across his face.  He focuses instead on keeping both hands steady on the empty Longboard bottle.  If he’s holding something, Danny won’t see his hands shaking.

 

“Steve, you don’t have to be sorry.  You haven’t done anything wrong.  This isn’t your fault, you know.  None of it is.”

 

But it kind of is, and he won’t say that to Danny because Danny will try to talk him around to seeing it differently, and that will annoy him, and he might shout or throw the bottle, and then Danny will know just how fucked up Steve is.

 

“I know that,” Steve says instead, and it’s a little lie, the tiniest thing, but it makes his stomach heavy and cold. 

 

“So who do you want to talk to,” Danny pushes, and Steve wants to get up out of the chair and go for a run or a swim or a drive, but he’s tired, so goddamned tired, and his hands are shaking, and he thinks there might be no way out of this except through.

 

Fuck it.

 

“Max.  I’ll talk to Max,” Steve says.

 

The quality of Danny’s answering silence is telling, and Steve bites his tongue against the urge to apologize again. 

 

There’s no way in heaven, hell, or anywhere in between that he’s talking with Danny about this. 

 

“You want me to talk, I’ll talk to Max,” he repeats, and there’s a note of belligerence there, daring Danny to complain now that he’s gotten what he wanted—though not really, because they both know Danny would have preferred Steve to talk to _him_.

 

“Okay, good. That’s good.  You want me to call him, or—”

 

“I got this, Danny.  Why don’t you go home, call that beautiful little girl of yours, get some sleep?”

 

He expects an argument.  Less than two hours ago, he invited Danny to stay.  Now, he’s changing the rules, shutting him out.

 

Instead, Danny says, “You don’t want me here?”

 

It’s not the words so much as the way he says them, quietly, with no real inflection, the voice Steve has heard Danny use on the phone with Rachel when he’s trying not to tell her how mad he is or how hurt or both.

 

Steve hates that he’s made Danny use that voice on him, but he can’t—he just _can’t_ —be with Danny right now.  If Danny stays, Steve might break, and he doesn’t think they’ll recover from Steve sharing this truth—this fucked up, awful thing that happened with his father.

 

“I just—I need time.  Besides, I’m not going to be much company.  I’ll probably sleep for the next eighteen hours.”

 

It’s a bald-faced lie, and they both know it, but because they both know it, it doesn’t bother Steve as much as the other one had.

 

Danny sucks his teeth, says, “Okay,” in that tone he gets when he’s unhappy but willing to humor Steve because he probably can’t physically restrain him instead.  “I’ll leave the sandwiches in the fridge.”

 

“Thanks, Danny.”  He moves to get up, but Danny waves him back down.

 

“I can see myself out.”

 

“Okay,” Steve says, and now it’s his turn to sound falsely casual, because it bothers him a little—okay, a lot—that Danny’s leaving without saying goodbye, without a hug or a handshake or something.

 

They haven’t been together that long, but Steve’s gotten used to the casual touching, the easy affection they usually pass back and forth between them.

 

From where he’s sitting, he doesn’t hear the door close, but a few moments later, the Camaro’s engine starts up, and then there’s a crunch of gravel and the unnatural quiet of a million things Steve should have said but didn’t and the one thing Danny wanted to hear that Steve is never going to say.

 

*****

 

“So, what you’re saying is it’s normal?”

 

Steve is so relieved he’s lightheaded—though come to that, it might be the meds, which he’d finally caved and taken when just putting his truck into gear had made him sweat.

 

“Quite normal, Commander.  Blood tests on victims of vampire attacks show elevated levels of a combination of dopamine- and serotonin-like chemicals, which function to make the victim compliant and even, perhaps, eager to be bitten.”

 

“Oh,” Steve says, breathless as much from relief as from a stirring uneasiness.  Why would his father do that to him?  Why would he put his mouth to his wound? Was he trying to drain him?  Or just ease his pain?

 

“There’s something else, Commander.  In certain cases, there is evidence that a vampire may also secrete a coagulant that slows blood loss in the victim.  Some researchers have suggested that this is intended to draw out the vampire’s pleasure or to keep the victim alive for future feedings, though others have theorized that within the hierarchy of vampire-human relationships, favored human donors are gifted with healing as a sign of the vampire’s affection.  In fact, a recent study from the University of Guam offers a third possibility, namely—”

 

“Thank you, Max,” Steve interrupts, recognizing the coroner’s zealous tone for what it is—the introduction to a much (much) longer lecture.  “You’ve been a big help—huge.  You have no idea.”

 

“Commander,” Max says as Steve hurries for the door, suddenly needing to see Danny and try to make things right with him.  Steve’s not a freak who needs to be ashamed of his perverse feelings for his father; he’s just a run-of-the-mill case study in vampire-human dynamics.

 

“I do not believe your father was trying to hurt you,” Max continues when Steve pauses in the half-open door and turns to look back at him.

 

Steve’s inclined to believe that himself, but he knows his own perceptions can’t be trusted.  He steps back into the office and lets the door swing closed.

 

“What makes you say that, Max?”  He tries to keep the hope out of his voice; he doesn’t need Max’s sympathy, well-meaning though it is. 

 

“Given your blood loss, Commander, you were a prime target for any vampire in the area.  Your father would have had to exert a great deal of self-discipline not to drain you himself.  For him to take the time to ease your suffering—well, I have to believe he was trying to slow the bleeding.”

 

“Mahalo, Max,” Steve says, though it comes out tight, like he has something in his throat he’s trying to breathe around.

 

“You’re welcome, Commander.  Aloha.”

 

“Aloha, Max,” Steve answers, making it all the way out of the door this time before leaning against the wall beside it, just out of sight of the door’s window. 

 

He takes a minute with his head down to breathe through the lightheadedness and to calm his racing thoughts, which threaten to paralyze him.

 

Knowing that his dad wasn’t trying to kill him or…well, whatever—it clarifies a number of things, not the least of which is that whatever John McGarrett is into, he seems to be trying to protect his son.

 

This should be comforting, and it is, in its own way.  But it raises a whole raft of questions that Steve can’t answer, not the least of which is who the hell is his father so afraid of that he’d bite Steve just to keep him out of the line of fire?

 

That question and all the others will have to wait for now, though, because Steve has an even more urgent matter to attend to, namely apologizing to his partner.

 

*****

 

In retrospect, Steve should have expected the wall of careful looks he’s getting as he walks through the door.

 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Kono says, hands on her hips like she’s expecting a fight.

 

“You look like hell, brah,” Chin adds by way of agreement.

 

Danny says nothing, but the blue circles under his eyes and the way his jaw muscle is ticking speak volumes anyway.

 

Steve holds up his hands in uncharacteristic surrender.  “I’m not staying.  Danny, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asks, indicating his office.

  
Danny’s tight nod does not bode well for the outcome of the meeting, but Steve ignores his stomach’s nervous flip and holds the door for his partner.

 

He doesn’t sit behind his desk; as much as he’d like the cover, he senses it’s the wrong move for this kind of discussion. He’s trying to figure out where to begin when Danny says, “I know what you’re going to say,” and before Steve can answer, Danny surprises him: “And you’re right.  I shouldn’t have pushed you like that.  I’m sorry.”

 

Steve’s shaking his head before Danny finishes.  “No, I’m the one who should be apologizing.  Again.”  He runs a hand over his mouth and perches on the edge of his desk, facing Danny, who’s standing midway between the door and the chairs.  He seems a long way away, and Steve considers his strategic choices for getting him to come closer.

 

They’re limited, this being a fishbowl and all.  He could close the blinds, but that would only make the looks they’d get even more annoying once they’d finished.

 

 So, it’ll have to be distance between them.

 

Despite the apology, Danny’s arms are crossed like he’s preparing to defend himself from something, and the tension in his shoulders doesn’t seem to have been eased by Steve’s admission.

 

He’s a little lost without his partner’s expressive gestures and elastic facial expressions; Danny’s not giving him much to go on.

 

“Okay,” Danny says, drawing the word out.  That’s as much of a cue as Steve’s going to get for explaining himself, so he hurries into the awkward gap left by Danny’s refusing to elaborate.  He’s obviously waiting to see where Steve takes this.

 

“I—”  It’s not very impressive.  For a guy who’s led vital mission briefings in front of two-star generals and has met more than one world leader, Steve’s making a poor showing.  Of course, he never had to tell any of those people how he was feeling.

 

He shakes his head, drawing a deep breath, and Danny says, “You don’t have to—”

 

“No, I do.  I do, Danny.  I just don’t know where to start.  Look…I don’t want to keep things from you.  I don’t want us to lie to each other, not even lies of omission.  But I’m not—  I don’t know how to…”  Words abandon him, and he’s left with a sort of flailing gesture to express his inability to articulate what’s going on.

 

Danny closes the space between them until he’s standing within touching distance, though far enough away to keep it professional.  Kono and Chin are pretending to be busy at the smart table, but Steve knows they’re watching.

 

“Babe,” Danny says, and that’s enough of a thaw to relieve some of Steve’s worry.  “We can do this later, when you’re ready.  We don’t have to do it now.”

 

Steve shakes his head again.  “No, I need to tell you.  When my father was…biting me in the warehouse, it, uh…it wasn’t like the last time, and I didn’t know how to feel about it.  I didn’t know that it could be…”

 

“Good?” Danny supplies.

 

Steve nods, blowing out a weak, nervous laugh.  “Yeah.  Yeah, you could say that.”

 

“Babe,” Danny says again, and this time it’s chiding.  “You should’ve said something.  I could’ve told you what victims who survived attacks like that have reported.”

 

Steve gives Danny a look, trying to express exactly how disturbing it is to be even a little turned on by your father.

 

“Okay, right.”  Danny grimaces.  “I can see how that would be…”

 

“Disturbing, Danny.  Really fucking disturbing.”

 

Steve usually keeps it pretty clean around the office, and Danny’s eyebrow quirks up at the vulgarity.

 

“Hey,” he says, in a quieter voice, the one he reserves for the bedroom.  “You know you can tell me anything, right?  I’m not going to judge you.  Hell, I’m not _going_ , period.  You’re stuck with me, partner.  You know that, right?”

 

As declarations of long-term commitment go, it’s pretty oblique, but Steve also talks in code a lot of the time, and he recognizes it for what it is.

  
He’s struck suddenly with a sensation of warmth and a wave of exhaustion simultaneously, the relief of Danny’s easy love even more powerful than what he’d felt when Max had explained his reaction to his father’s bite.

 

“Just…”  Danny goes on.  “I know it’s hard for you to talk about your feelings, Steve, but you gotta give me something now and then, okay?”

 

“Yeah,” Steve says, and when Danny rolls his eyes— _case in point_ —Steve adds, “I’ll try, okay?”

 

“You do that.”  Danny steps closer, and Steve spreads his legs instinctively to let him in.  The classic guy half-hug turns into something longer, slower, and much, much gayer when Danny nuzzles Steve’s neck just below his ear and rumbles, “Later, I’m going to open you up in a whole other way.”

 

Steve’s eyes stutter closed around the fire that Danny’s words and the tone of his voice, low and rough and filthy, starts in him.  He clears his throat as his cock stirs to life, and Danny takes it for the signal it is, backing off far enough to give him a wicked smirk that does nothing to reduce his interest.

 

“Later,” Danny says, ghosting his pink tongue over his lower lip and turning to sashay for the door with far more hip swaying than the action warrants.

 

Jesus.

 

Steve clears his throat again, calls, “Good talk,” out after him as he moves out into the office, where Kono is wearing a smirk of her own and Chin is ostentatiously looking anywhere but at the two of them.

 

He spends a few minutes sitting behind his desk thinking about field-stripping an M4 before he can leave his office without further embarrassing himself.  It’s going to be a long day, he thinks, turning the truck toward home.

 

*****

 

Steve is dreaming of a poppy field on fire, the pungent smoke obscuring the little village that lays beyond it.  His world is narrowed to what he can see through his scope, which is scanning the village for signs of life.  Freddie is saying, “We have to move!” in his ear, but Steve is pinned down, a weight on his legs that he can’t see, even if he were willing to take his eyes off the field.

 

He tries to say, “I can’t move,” but though his lips move, no sound gets past them. 

 

In his crosshairs, he catches movement and fixes on it, watches a woman on fire emerging from the flames.  Her burqa flutters around her as it burns, and in the sharp resolution of the lens, he sees her eyes swimming with reflected light.

 

He thinks she’s screaming, but he can hear nothing but the pounding of his own heart, the blood thundering in his ears.

 

She nears him, her stutter-shot motion like a badly synched film reel, and Freddie is screaming, “Get out!  Get out!  Get out!” in the comms, but Steve can’t move, weighted to the earth, with nothing to do but wait for her to reach out a slender, pale hand and set him alight.

 

A hand reaches for him in the half-light, and he grabs it, twisting, as he pushes himself up to his knees for better leverage.

  
“Steve!” he hears, and it’s Freddie, but far away, and then, “Steve, wake up!”

 

His eyes take in a scene his brain refuses to make sense of, and it’s Danny saying, “Hey, Babe, you okay?” in a strained, quiet voice that brings him back to himself.

 

Danny is half under him, his wrist bent sharply back, his whole arm pressed against his torso.  He’s panting and red-faced, obviously in pain.

 

Steve lets him go and vaults from the bed, stops in the middle of the room, feels his gorge rise and only just makes it to the toilet to vomit up what little he’d eaten that morning.

 

He’s shaking, weak-kneed, stomach still roiling, when Danny comes to the door and says, “You okay?”

 

“Are you?” he shoots back, voice rough, eyes swimming with puke-tears.

 

“I’m fine, see?”  Danny says, waving his abused hand around to prove it.

 

“What are you doing here?  What time is it?”  Steve remembered coming home from the Palace, stripping to his briefs, and climbing into bed.  Nothing else.

 

“It’s almost 6:00,” Danny says.  “And I came to see if you were okay.  I heard you upstairs, thought something was wrong.  I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have startled you like that.”

 

“No, Danny, Jesus.  I’m the one who should apologize.”  He’s tired of saying those words, tired of _needing_ to say them.

 

Danny shakes his head, shrugs.  “No harm, no foul.  You hungry?”

 

He’s really not, and it must show on his face because Danny grimaces by way of apology, eyes taking in the toilet, Steve’s clammy pallor, the general state of things.

 

“What can I do to help?”  He sounds careful, like he’s bracing for Steve to say, _Nothing_.

 

“Stick around a while?”

 

It’s not what either of them expected, but Steve’s not sorry he’s asked.  Danny’s face brightens, and he nods rapidly.  “Sure, I can do that.”

 

“Okay,” Steve breathes, scrubbing a hand over his face, trying to get the remnants of the dream to shake loose and float away.

 

They go downstairs, where Danny fixes himself a sandwich, and then they stretch out side by side on the couch, feet on the coffee table, to watch a game Steve had recorded forever ago.  It feels like years since he’s just sat still and let his mind fasten on something innocuous.  Now and then, Danny remarks on a play or asks a question about Steve’s football career or gives him shit over his taste in teams.

 

It feels almost normal, which makes Steve a little nervous because normal isn’t in his wheelhouse, and he’s sure it’s a sign of impending doom.

 

About ten, Danny calls it a night, getting up to bus his plate and beer bottles—Steve had declined to join him, sucking on ice cubes all night to rehydrate without triggering another ‘incident’.  Steve turns the TV off as Danny taps his legs to get him to drop them so he can step between Steve’s knees and brace himself on the back of the couch to lean in for a long kiss.

 

Steve tilts his head up and lets Danny take the lead, enjoying the way Danny’s big hand cups his jaw, the way his thumb rubs his cheek while they kiss.

 

When Danny pulls away and says, “G’night,” Steve feels bereft and wonders if he should ask Danny to stay.

 

Before he can work up the courage, Danny’s at the door, giving him a smile and a wave before disappearing into the darkness.

 

He’s slept so much of the day that he’s not tired, and Danny’s kiss has made him aware of his skin in a way that’s detrimental to his mental health, so Steve paces the first floor for a while, trying to fix his mind on something, before he remembers the Champ box.

 

Steve’s been understandably preoccupied with his not-actually-dead father, so he hasn’t had much time for the other great parental mystery in his life

 

A few hours later, Danny is back, brought by the thirty-second phone call Steve had made when he’d been able to marshal enough breath to make the call.

 

Steve can imagine what Danny sees as he comes to the study door:  Steve on the floor surrounded by postcards, letters, photos, a matchbook, and the detritus of someone else’s life, a life Steve’s realized over the course of this long and lonely night of which he’d had little knowledge and in which he’d played virtually no part.

 

The look he gives Danny as his partner comes through the door must be pretty dire because Danny is on his knees beside him saying, “Steve, what is it?” before he can spackle together the necessary words.

 

Using the piles he’s made around him, he walks Danny through the case he’s built.  His own voice sounds tinny and far away, and Danny himself sometimes appears as though Steve is looking at him through a telescoping lens.  He realizes that something’s wrong with him, that he should probably get up, get a glass of water, some air—anything but keep pointing and talking like this is the world’s most disturbing session of show and tell.

 

Steve can’t, though.  He has to tell someone so that someone can say, “You’re crazy.”

 

Steve half wants to be crazy.  It’d be easier than accepting what he thinks he’s figured out.

 

“So, you’re saying your mother’s death wasn’t an accident?” Danny asks when Steve finally winds down to rephrasing the same handful of unanswerable questions.

 

“They killed her, Danny.  And Dad knew it, so they ‘killed’ him, too.”  He inflects the air quotes, and Danny nods like he gets it.

 

“Okay,” Danny answers, and it’s not the humoring kind of agreement.  It’s the way Danny says it when he’s got something thinking to do.

 

Steve shuts up and lets him, closing his eyes, owning the pain when he realizes he mustn’t have been blinking.  Tears well up behind his lids in reaction to the stinging, and he wipes them away with a weary gesture. 

 

“Tell me I’m crazy,” he pleads.

 

Danny’s expression telegraphs his answer.  “You’re not, Steve.  I’m so sorry.”

 

Steve nods, feeling his throat tighten painfully, and he swallows twice, glad he hadn’t eaten anything earlier in the evening, pretty sure he’d be bringing it up right now if he had.

 

This whole time, Danny’s been sitting in a chair he’d pulled as close to Steve as the piles would let him get.  Now, he steps over the barrier and squats next to Steve, not bothering to hide the wince as he puts the strain on his knees.

 

“Hey,” Danny says.  “Let’s go to bed.”  Danny’s hand on Steve’s shoulder is heavy and hot, and Steve is shocked at how cold he suddenly is.  He shivers beneath Danny’s touch, and Danny moves his hand to Steve’s neck, wrapping his fingers around his nape.

 

Steve blows out a breath and drops his head, letting Danny knead the tension away, letting the heat of his touch wash through him.

 

He’s too tired for sex, he thinks, until he realizes his cock is filling, slow but sure, and if they weren’t surrounded by the terrible evidence of yet another lie rising out of the grave of Steve’s past to hurt him, he’d lay down right here and let Danny have his way.

 

Instead, he summons the last of his reserves, says, “Come to bed?” and works on standing, wincing in sympathy when Danny’s knees crack as he, too, rises.

 

Before he can move toward the stairs, Danny says, “Let’s get this cleaned up.”

 

Steve appreciates that even in this moment, Danny’s a good cop, wanting to secure the evidence in case of some awful eventuality.

 

Together, it takes very little time, and with Danny there and the promise that awaits him upstairs, Steve finds it easier not to linger over certain images that he’s sure will revisit him in dreams for many nights to come.

 

For this night, though, he’s got a better image to replace them with, and as Danny takes his cold hand and leads him toward the stairs, Steve feels a stir of excitement so pure that it makes him smile.  The anticipation of what’s to come is unsullied by all the other shit in his life;  this thing they have together came from his dad’s ‘death,’ but it has grown so far beyond those unfortunate origins that Steve feels only heat in his belly and a racing heart as he watches Danny move up the stairs ahead of him.

 

*****

 

Later, he won’t remember how they got naked or the stupid, lewd things they said to each other in the process.

 

He won’t remember that his skin feels shivery with over-exposure, that Danny rests a hand against his forehead and makes a comment about being hot for the wrong reason.

 

He won’t even remember when Danny sucks a love-mark into the tender skin where his neck meets his shoulder—though he’ll certainly know it’s there the next day.

 

What Steve will remember is the moment when Danny straddles him—how solid Danny’s hips feel beneath his hands and the give of his flesh there as he holds on; how Danny sheathes him so slowly that Steve thinks he might lose his mind—the heat and clutch of him, the tight, hot grip that pulses around him.

 

He’ll remember Danny’s expression of, first, concentration—pink tip of his tongue poking out between his teeth as he works himself onto Steve’s cock.  Then, eyes widening, the surprise of adjustment and wonder at the way that Steve fills him up.  Finally, the candid love in his eyes as he shifts for the first time, rocking himself into place and fucking himself on Steve’s cock.

 

Steve groans at the heat and the impossible tightness, breaks the syllables of Danny’s name.  The love on Danny’s face, the trust he’s offered opening himself up this way hurts in a good way that Steve doesn’t have words for, even if he could manage them right now. 

 

It’s the first time they’ve done this together, and it breaks something loose in Steve’s chest, some final fear he’d been harboring about being left by this man, too.

 

He’s exhausted, wrung out from the discovery of his mother’s fate, the wreck it left of his memories, but he feels like he could finish the Iron Man with Danny giving him that look, that trust, and he digs his heels into the bed and thrusts up, groaning again with the feeling of Danny’s weight against him, holding him down, and Danny’s body accepting him easily, like they were meant for this.

 

He brings a hand up to Danny’s cock, and Danny says, “N-no, close,” and grips his wrist to stop him.  Steve offers his own smile, which is probably goofy with the pleasure and love and wonder he’s feeling, and Danny rolls his eyes, says, “So stubborn.  Fine,” and lets Steve go to work.

 

Danny’s cock is heavy and hot in Steve’s hand, and he takes the time to admire it, to balance its weight and feel the silken power of it, before he tightens his grip and urges Danny on.  “Fuck me, Danny,” he growls, putting his hips into the order, and Danny’s eyes stutter closed, he bites his lower lip, rocks into the relief of Steve’s hand, and comes in ropey spurts over Steve’s chest.

 

The frantic clutching of Danny’s body, the long, drawn-out cry he makes, the expression on his face, tight with pleasure, drops Steve over the edge, and he lets go, chanting, “Danny, god, Danny, yeah,” until he’s reduced to incoherence and closes his eyes against the intensity of feeling taking him apart.

 

Danny collapses against him, and Steve welcomes the weight of him and the feeling of being hidden from the world.  He wraps his arms around Danny’s lower back, feels the sweat and spend sliding between their heaving bellies, smells their combined pleasure, hears Danny murmuring words private and sacred against his damp neck.

 

“I love you,” Steve says.  “So much.”

 

He loses time, then, and when he comes back to himself, Danny’s wiping him clean with a warm, wet cloth and slapping him on the hip to get him to stop hogging the middle of the bed.

 

Danny slides under the covers, pulling the sheet up over them, and nestles in when Steve lifts his arm to wrap around him.  They fit together this way, too, and for a second Steve thinks he might suffocate with the way his heart is swelling in his chest.

 

Then Danny says, “They can hear you thinking from space,” and Steve says, “Shut up,” and that’s how they fall asleep.

 


	4. Chapter Four

When Steve strolls—sashays, almost, a satisfied roll of the hips that he just can’t seem to help, given the way Danny is making his much more careful way to his own office—through the door, the first thing he sees is the box on his desk.

 

It’s not very large—about the size of a carton of cigarettes—made of wood carved with intricate swirls, and it has a peachy green scent that suggests it once held tea. 

 

Before he opens it, he checks for boobytraps, holds it up to his ear to make sure it’s not ticking, raises it carefully from the desk to look for pressure plates or wires.

 

Once satisfied that it isn’t going to explode in his face, Steve removes the lid.  Inside are three items:  A flash drive, a dog tag Steve thought he’d buried with his father, and a human index finger, shriveled to the crinkling point, still wearing a ring with a symbol Steve’s seen somewhere before.

 

“Chin, you have that unnetworked laptop?”

 

Because he’s Chin, he doesn’t ask questions when Steve strides from his office looking like he’s on the trail of the Furies themselves.  He just fetches the computer from his office and leaves it on the smart table, where Steve uses it to plug in the flash drive.

 

On it is a single file, marked “Wo Fat.”

 

In the file are details of Doris McGarrett’s death:  materiel, fuse, detonator, the signature of a bombmaker who went by the name of “Expo” until he’d been killed in Somalia in 2009.  John McGarrett’s notes are thorough, delving into Expo’s background and the reason he was likely chosen by Wo Fat’s organization to do the kind of work he most enjoyed, work that sent such a lethal message to the families of his victims.

 

At the end of Expo’s litany of sins are two words in boldface:  Dead end.

 

Steve has Catherine on the phone before he can think better of it, and by the somewhat strained smile he can hear in her voice, he knows he’s surprised her, perhaps not in a good way.

 

Still, she has connections and resources he doesn’t, and Steve is going to ask.  Spinning a story on the fly, Steve gives her enough to get her started on the search for intel on Expo that was in top secret files well above Steve’s own security clearance.

 

“Is this the kind of file that sends up red flags when someone looks at it?” she asks, no smile in her voice at all now.  He can practically see her chewing on the corner of her lip.

 

“Honestly:  Probably?” he answers.  “But, Cath, I need it.  It’s about my father.”  This isn’t precisely a lie; it is John who gave Steve the intel to begin with, after all.

 

He hears her sigh over the line.

 

“Fine.  But it’s going to take a few days.  I’ll have to be careful to cover my tracks.”

 

“Understood.  And hey, I owe you dinner.”

 

“Yeah, yeah.  I’ve heard that before.”

 

Danny gives Steve a searching look from his end of the table and Steve shakes his head— _later_ —and then passes the laptop to Kono.

 

“Can you make sure there’s no spyware or anything like that on the file before I download it?  I want to put it somewhere more secure than a flashdrive.”

 

Kono offers a wry smile.  “I’m not sure such a place exists, Boss, but I’ll check the file for stowaways before we do anything else with it.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Kono nods absently, fingers already flying over the keys.

 

“Chin, see what you can dig up on Wo Fat and his organization.”

 

Chin goes to work at the smart table.

 

“What about me?” Danny asks, and Steve has a vivid flashback to the moment earlier that morning when Danny had asked the same question after giving Steve a white-out-inducing blowjob in the shower.

 

Steve swallows, trying not to let his thoughts show on his face, but by the way Danny shifts minutely in place, he knows his partner is having the same pleasant but distracting thought.

 

“Let’s pay a visit to our favorite CI,” Steve suggests, which is how they end up paying a premium mark-up for two enormous shave ices they aren’t going to eat.

 

Kamekona gives them mostly rumors, nothing solid, but by the way he skates around the edges of a certain word, they understand he’s in on the whole creatures-of-the-night thing.

 

It’s a relief, really, Steve thinks, that their best CI is also useful for their off-the-books activities, too, even if he is a little irritated at the discovery that yet another person he knows was aware of the whole vampires-are-real deal way before he’d been clued in.

 

Kamekona’s stoic expression changes when Steve shows him a shot of the finger and ring.

 

“What?” Danny asks, but the big man just shakes his head.

 

“Nuh-uh. No way.”

 

“C’mon, what do we pay you for?” Danny wheedles, raising his voice just a touch, as if he might spill the beans on their arrangement. 

 

All three of them know Danny’s not going to sour their mutually useful arrangement, but Kamekona grimaces and says, “Fine, but not here.  Buy me lunch, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

 

Thankfully, the big guy has affordable tastes.  A food truck plate lunch at an umbrella-shaded table not far from the Rainbow Hilton’s pristine beach gets them the intel they need.

 

“What are you thinking?” Danny asks as they head back to the Palace in the Camaro.

 

“We go in,” Steve says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world to hit a Yakuza-run illegal gaming den in the heart of Chinatown.  Kamekona had emphasized how protected the place is and how connected its proprietress, Lady Wei.

 

“Obviously,” Danny answers, his snark on full display.  “We wouldn’t want to track down leads or pursue suspects in a manner less likely to get us shot at, captured, tortured, and/or killed.”

 

Steve hears the worry in Danny’s voice.  “I’m not going to do anything stupid, Danny.”

 

“Babe,” Danny says, and how he manages to pack so much incredulity into that single not-so-affectionate term of endearment is, well, a skill—probably native to New Jersey and genetic in the Williams clan. 

 

“You’re worried about me.  That’s sweet,” Steve answers, his smuggest smirk firmly on his face.  It’s deflection of his favorite kind, and usually, it gets him the results he most enjoys.

 

He’s expecting Danny to erupt, so the pointed silence from his side of the car is a signal that this conversation is headed in a direction Steve hadn’t anticipated.

 

“Might I remind you,” Danny says in his most careful—and, Steve knows from experience, most dangerous—tone, “That in the last two months you’ve been hospitalized twice?  And that in the last two days, you’ve discovered that your mother’s death was no accident and that your father was probably aware of it all along and that somehow the McGarretts are hereditary enemies of a shadowy Master vampire who is also a crime boss who makes Gotti look like a schoolyard bully?”

 

Steve appreciates the precis, really he does, but, “‘Hereditary enemies,’ Danny?  Why not go full-on ‘blood feud’ and spare us the understatement.”  He’s still winding Danny up, still relying on a different script, partly because he’s a little irritated at Danny’s mothering and partly because he’s at sea. 

 

“Fuck you,” his partner intones in precise syllables, and Steve tries backtracking.

 

“Hey, look, I appreciate that you’re worried about me. I do.  _Really_ ,” Steve add when Danny’s scoff interrupts the rest of his half-assed apology.  “I’m not trying to make light of the situation, okay?  I know how bad this looks.”

 

“Looks?  LOOKS?  You think I’m worried about how this _looks_ , Steven?  I don’t give a shit if you’re sworn to do eternal battle against the Prince of Darkness,” Danny answers, hands moving emphatically, volume rising. 

 

“What I care about is you, you big putz.  It’s like the only strategy they taught you in SEAL school was how to charge directly into the line of fire and take as many hits as you can and then grit your teeth and bear it when they sew you up afterwards.”

 

 “You matter,” Danny shouts, fisted hands pounding his own thighs.  “You, Steven J. McGarrett matter.  To me and Gracie, to Kono, Chin, Max, Kamekona.  We’re the ‘ohana’ you’re always going on about, right?  So, would you fucking let us be that family for you?  Do you think you could do that for us?  Maybe NOT storm directly into the line of fire and take all the hits for us?  Do you think maybe you could let us shoulder some of the work?  Huh?  Can you do that?  Or is it too much for that over-sized ego and stupid military stoicism you’ve got going on to let us _help_ you?”

 

Steve isn’t so much stunned by the passion of Danny’s outburst—that, at least, is a common denominator in all their skirmishes.  No, it’s not Danny’s anger that surprises Steve.  What shocks him is the pain he can hear in his partner’s voice, the desperation born, apparently, of Steve’s own pigheaded inability to share:  His toys (even when they actually belong to his partner), his feelings…even the work they do together, theoretically as a team.

 

He’s never thought of himself as particularly selfish.  Sure, he’s got some control-freak tendencies that come off as obnoxious—he’s neurotic, not un-self-aware.  But Steve has always tried to do what’s best for the other people in his life, regardless of his own level of comfort.

 

Now, he’s finding out that his personal code of sacrifice might be having opposite its intended effect.

 

“I don’t have a martyr complex,” he says, keeping his voice low.  In the charged space between them, it sounds like an explosion.

 

“Like hell,” Danny answers.  Steve risks taking his eyes off the road to see the red rims of his partner’s eyes and the way he’s squinting, like he’s trying not to cry—or scream.

 

“Or a death wish,” he continues, ignoring Danny’s interjection.  This statement earns him a derisive noise, and Danny turns his head to stare out the side window.

 

Steve has pulled into a parking area along a thin strip of beach only sparsely populated by locals because the waves are unimpressive and the fumes from the road omnipresent.

 

Now, he shifts in his seat to better see his partner.

 

“Danny, I don’t.  I’ve got more reason now to stick around than I have in a long time, you know?”  It’s a huge admission, and it seems to take up all the air in the car.  Steve feels a little lightheaded, a little short of breath.

 

“Oh?” Danny says, turning his head, a look of challenge on his face.  He’s not smiling, not satisfied.  He’s going to make Steve say it, damnit.

 

Steve grimaces.  It’s an act of will to keep his eyes on Danny’s face.  He wants to get out of the car, go for a walk—or better, a swim, the glide of his muscles in synch with the waves driving everything else out of his head.

 

Instead, he stays put, and it’s probably the hardest thing he’s ever done, except maybe listen to his father dying thousands of miles away.

 

“I’ve got you,” Steve says.  Then, because he’s not sure, because he’s built a life around the holes other people have left in it, he adds, “Don’t I?”

 

“You still have to ask?”  Danny sounds hurt, and there’s a troubled tightness around his mouth that makes Steve want to kiss him.  He recognizes that for the deflecting tactic that it is, though, and keeps his hands—and the rest of him—to himself.

 

“Danny,” Steve breathes.  “I can’t—,” and he really can’t.  The tightness in his chest is moving up his throat like a paralytic poison, and he’s having trouble taking in any air.  Panic sweat prickles across his shoulders and at the nape of his neck.  He swallows convulsively. 

 

“Jesus, you’re fucked up,” Danny grouses, but he wraps his hand around Steve’s neck and pulls him across the gearshift for a searing public kiss that leaves Steve breathless for a different reason.

 

When Danny eases away from him, he keeps his hand on Steve’s neck, and the heat and weight of the touch grounds him.  
  
  


“I love you,” Danny articulates, holding Steve’s eyes.  “I’m not going anywhere.  I’ve told you this before.  But since it’s obvious you need more convincing, turn this car around and take us back to the Palace, so we can share what we’ve learned with the other people who love you against our collective better judgement and come up with a plan— _together_ —to infiltrate the Rooster and the Dragon and cozy up to Lady Wei for a little chat about a certain Master.”

 

“Okay,” Steve says, voice rough.  
  


  
“Okay?  Just like that?” Danny asks, finally taking his hand from Steve’s neck and sitting back in his seat.

 

Steve shrugs.  “I trust you.”  The fact that he means the words, means them in all the ways they can be understood, still scares the crap out of him, but Steve McGarrett, last in a long line of stoics and trained by the Navy to withstand physical and psychological torture at the hands of his enemies, has never let fear stop him and isn’t about to now.

 

Not when it promises him so much more than he’s ever had before:

 

Hope.

 

Family.

  
Love.

 

*****

 

In the end, the op goes down with surprisingly little fuss.  Kono and Chin make the most sense to go in, dressed to the nines and wearing their earwigs.  The inside of the club is dark and smoky, the clack of Mahjong tiles competing with a susurrus of exclamations as patrons win or lose their fortunes.

 

Ladies in tasteful sarongs bearing trays of drinks circulate through the smoke.  Big guys with bigger guns stand guard at every door, including the one in the back marked “Private.”

 

Kono works her way there after charming a handsy high roller named Yao, who slips the bouncer a tile marked with a familiar symbol—the same one on the signet ring in Steve’s possession—which gets them past the bruiser and into an even darker sanctum, where low couches and heavy drapes mark off alcoves for private assignations.

 

All of this is in Kono’s after action report.

 

They don’t have to read her report to hear the unmistakable sounds of people in various stages of pleasure, and Steve’s tensing in the surveillance truck, Danny putting a quelling hand on his wrist, when Chin says, “Hey, have you seen my girl?” in a slurred voice, as if he’s happy-drunk.

 

The bouncer grunts something indecipherable, and Chin says, “Thanks, brah,” as if he’s gotten what he came for, and then there’s another grunt, a sigh, and the sound of a heavy body slithering quietly to the floor.

 

“I’m in,” Chin says, and soon they’re getting sex sounds in stereo.  
  


  
Kono has already incapacitated Yao and is waiting for her cousin.  They narrate their way through the deep, narrow room to a back door, which is locked, though not for long.

 

Then they hear, “I was wondering who had the audacity to infiltrate my lair,” and beside him, Danny snorts, his derision at the woman’s word choice obvious.

 

Steve strains to hear any sign of trouble, but Chin’s voice is light and easy when he says, “Lady Wei, I presume?”

 

“What can I do for two fine members of Hawaii’s premier task force?” the woman answers in lightly accented English.

 

“Come with us, please,” Kono asks, her tone somewhat less confident than Chin’s.  Steve wonders what she’s picked up on that Chin has missed—that Kono is the most intuitive of them all has grown obvious over the months they’ve been working together, particularly in their night work.

 

“I’m afraid I cannot oblige you,” the woman answers.  “Perhaps you could ask your questions here?  And certainly, invite your friends outside to join us.  The door to your left will allow them immediate entrance.”

 

Steve and Danny share a look.  “Whaddya think?” Steve asks.

 

Danny shrugs.  “It could be a trap, but if it is, that’s one ballsy lady, taking out the entire team in one go.”

 

Steve nods.  “Yeah.  Look, stay here?  And watch your back.”

 

“You do the same,” Danny says.

 

“Copy that.”

 

The dead-eyed young man on the alley door doesn’t so much as blink when Steve appears at the door, nor does he give any indication that he cares that Steve is wearing a tac vest, flash-bangs, and his sidearm.

 

The hair on the back of his neck crawls as he reaches out to the door handle.  He half expects to feel a blow to the neck.

 

Nothing happens, though, except that he crosses into a room only slightly brighter than the dark alley behind him and finds a middle-aged Asian woman in a tailored white silk suit sitting behind an antique lacquered desk.  She’s in the process of putting down her teacup when Steve steps into the circle of brighter light cast by a standing lamp behind her desk.

 

Only the slight chink of her cup against its saucer indicates that Lady Wei is surprised by what she sees, but she gives no other indication, and in the ten minutes they spend interrogating her—politely but firmly, and with much creative energy expended on rephrasing questions she refuses to answer—the only thing Steve learns is what she revealed inadvertently:  Steve is familiar to her, and not because she’s done her homework on the Five-0 task force.

 

“You’ve seen my father,” he says at last, when it’s patently apparent that they’ll get nothing else from her.

 

She inclines her head in answer.

 

“Then you should know that we McGarretts don’t give up so easily.  If I have to drag you out of here myself, I will, but there will be bloodshed on both sides, and we can spare each other that if you’ll just tell me what I want to know.”

 

Lady Wei tilts her head, considering.  Steve holds her cool gaze, unblinking, until she inclines her head again, just the barest nod.

 

“Only you,” she orders, and it’s Steve’s turn to nod. 

 

“You heard the lady,” he says, and he can practically hear Danny shouting at him from the truck out front.  Kono says, “You sure, Boss?” but Chin touches her elbow, and after they exchange one of their telepathic looks, they leave out the door he’d come through.

 

“Earwig,” Lady Wei says, holding out her hand. 

 

He pries it out and drops it in her palm, and with the slightest wrinkling of her nose, she turns her hand to drop it in her tea.

 

“What I am about to say must never leave this room.   You may act upon the information I provide you, but you may, under no circumstances, indicate from whom you’ve heard it.  I say this not for the sake of my reputation nor even for the prolonging of my life but to protect you and the people you care for.  Your life is worth nothing should someone discover the source of your information.  Am I clear?”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve says, settling into parade rest, feigning an ease he doesn’t feel.  Even before she begins speaking, he feels the skin tightening across his shoulders and senses that his life is about to change—again—in unpleasant ways.

 

Even with that impression, Steve is reeling by the time she stops speaking and indicates, with a gracious gesture, that he should leave now.

 

Out in the truck, Danny’s diatribe dies three words in, something on Steve’s face telegraphing his distress.

 

“You okay?” Danny asks instead, scanning him visibly for wounds.

 

Steve says, “Yeah,” but his voice sounds strange.  His ears are ringing—hypertension, he thinks—and his mouth is dry.

 

“What did she say?” Danny asks.

 

Steve shakes his head.  “Give me a few, huh?”

 

Danny opens his mouth, obviously intending to protest, and then shuts it again, squeezing Steve’s shoulder instead as he gets up.  “Let’s hit the road.”

 

Steve follows him mutely to the truck’s cab and says nothing all the way back to the Palace, where they meet up with Kono and Chin long enough to check in.  Steve sends them home, telling them he’ll fill them in tomorrow.  He’s got to digest what he’s learned, and they all look like they could use the rest.

 

“Hey,” Danny says, slapping him lightly on the back, “You too.” 

 

Chin and Kono are long gone, but Danny’s been shuffling papers in his office, making a show of waiting for Steve to pack it in.  Apparently tired of waiting, he’d come through Steve’s door a minute ago.

 

Steve sits back in his seat and closes his eyes, which are burning with fatigue.  There’s a faint trembling in the muscles of his hands, too, and he knows he needs to sleep.

  
“C’mon, you big dope, I’ll drive you home.  You’re a health hazard to every other driver on the road.”

 

Steve caves gracelessly, grumbles about paperwork, but follows his partner and is so tired that he doesn’t even care that Danny’s driving like an old lady.

 

He wakes up as Danny puts the Camaro into park in front of Steve’s place.  He doesn’t shut the engine off.

 

“You want me to come in?” Danny asks.  If it’s meant to be lascivious, the effect is somewhat ruined by the face-splitting yawn that accompanies it.

 

“I think you’d better,” Steve says, smiling fondly at him.

 

They strip and crawl into Steve’s bed, and Steve has barely closed his eyes before his phone alarm goes off and thin morning light penetrates his sleepy brain.

 

A swim, a shower, and two cups of coffee later, he feels a little more human.  Danny, who’d called Steve a barbarian when he’d gotten up at dawn, had finally emerged, wild-haired and adorable, about the time Steve was thinking about coming up to wake him.

 

He’s half disappointed to see his partner in the kitchen doorway; he’d been entertaining some interesting ideas about how to get the job done.

 

“You want some coffee?”

 

Danny shakes his head.  “I need a change of clothes and a toothbrush first.  Let’s swing by my place, then pick up coffee and sandwiches on the way in.”

 

“You know, you could leave a few things here,” Steve offers, trying for casual and managing awkward instead.

 

Danny pins him in place with a suddenly awake and aware look.  “You sure about that, Steve?”

 

Steve nods, closing the space between them, putting his hands on Danny’s hips and going in for a kiss, Danny’s morning breath be damned.

 

“I’m sure.”

 

He’s not certain about many things in his life, but on this one thing, anyway, Steve feels pretty confident:  Waking up with Danny every day is worth some drawer space, a spare key, and the inevitable whispers they’re going to put up with.

 

Danny’s smile, wide and warm, is also another excellent reason for letting him into Steve’s home and his life.

 

*****

 

“So, John is acting as a double agent:  Pretending loyalty to Wo Fat but feeding intel to other Masters to undermine his empire and bring him down?”

 

“Jesus,” Danny throws in.  “I see where you get it now.”

 

Steve ignores him in favor of asking Kono, “Where are we on that name Lady Wei gave us?”

 

“There are three ‘Justices’ on the island, but one of them is four, one of them is eighty-two, and the third is at Halawa.”

 

“We should be building a vampire database,” Chin grouses.  It’s not the first time that observation has been made, and as with all the other times, Steve promises he’ll allocate resources to building said database as soon as things get less busy.  Since that’s just this side of never, apparently, he’s not holding out much hope.

 

“We need a dedicated geek to do it for us,” Danny says, and Steve agrees, though he says nothing. 

 

“The other intel she gave you, though, checks out.  There is an empty warehouse on Sand Island that is showing power spikes from 1:00 to 4:00am nightly,” Kono continues, as though she hadn’t just been mercilessly interrupted.

 

“Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a rave,” Chin says.

 

Steve nods.  “Lady Wei said it’s invitation only.  No way me and you, Danny, are going to score an invite.  Kono stands a chance though.  Whaddya say to throwing on something, uh, _else_ and heading over to Maunakea and Kukui?  Your contact is a kid named ‘Elvis,’ pink hair, neck tat.”

 

“If she gave you all of this, why didn’t she just give you the invites herself?”  Danny complained.

 

“Compartmentalization.  Lady Wei is insulating herself from blame and deflecting attention.  Technically, this rave isn’t hers at all.  She just supplies some of the party favors.”  Steve hadn’t asked her what those were; he genuinely didn’t want to know, and he had been afraid she’d enjoy telling him.  One vampire syndicate at a time.

 

“So, who’s Justice?”  Chin asks.

 

“Low-level vamp who’s responsible for supplying vamp blood capsules to the wannabes who show up at these parties.  He’s also their enforcer, supposed to keep any visiting vamps from going too far when they snack on the ravers.”  Again, Steve hadn’t asked for any more detail.  He had bigger—and more lethal—fish to fry.

 

“Kids go to these things _hoping_ to get bitten?” Danny’s face reflects his disgust.

 

Steve tries not to take Danny’s comment as a judgment on his own experience.  “It feels good, and they get a rush out of the danger of it.”

 

“Or they have a death wish,” Kono adds darkly.

 

“Yeah, maybe,” Steve agrees.  He catches Danny’s eyes on his face, speculative, and he looks away.

  
“It doesn’t bother you, Boss?”  Kono’s eyes were troubles.  “Half these kids are probably just looking for someone to take care of them.  They’re lost, you know?”

 

Steve nods.  “I know.  And yeah, it bothers me.  But we have a job to do:  Take down Wo Fat.  We do that, we’ll be able to focus on these other players.  Right now, we have to keep our eyes on the ball.”

 

Kono says, “Okay.  I’ll go home and put on something…sleazier.”

 

“Chin, go with her.  Make sure the contact doesn’t go sideways.” 

 

“Copy that.”

 

When they’ve left, Danny blows out a breath and says, “I’m sorry.”

 

“What for?”

 

“I wasn’t thinking of your…situation…when I said that thing before.”  Danny’s eyes are anxious, and he’s biting the inside of his cheek like he does when he’s thinking too much.

 

For these reasons, Steve says, “It’s okay, Danny.  I get it.”  And he does.  Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, though.

 

“You know what I wish?” Danny asks wistfully.

 

“What?”

 

“I wish we could catch a good, old-fashioned murder case.  You know, wife bumps off husband for insurance or something like that.  Simple.  Clean.  No fuss, no muss.”

 

“Yeah, the good ol’ days of jealous spouses, vengeful business partners, insurance scams…” 

 

Steve’s teasing, a smile at the corner of his mouth.  He’s winding Danny up on purpose because he loves watching him gather steam, loves the way his hands add emphasis to his words and the way his eyes light up when he’s onto something.

 

“Exactly!  You just don’t see that kind of attention to ordinary detail among the vampire set.  They have no respect at all for the old ways.”

 

“Upstart bastards,” Steve agrees.  He’s smiling full on now, and it feels good—a little strange, like his facial muscles have forgotten the expression, but good.

 

Danny catches what Steve is saying and huffs to a halt, giving him a critical once-over, like he knows he’s being baited and wants Steve to know he knows.

 

“Now what?” Danny asks.

 

“Now, we wait for Kono to come back with the invitation to tonight’s rave.”

 

“And then?”

 

“Then we stake out the warehouse while she and Chin go in, figure it out from there.”

 

“Ah, the time-honored ‘flying by the seat of our pants’ approach to crime-stopping. This is why they pay you the big bucks, Steve.”

 

“Also, lunch,” Steve adds, jingling the Camaro keys.

 

Lunch consists of fish tacos at an umbrella table under the swaying palms, girls in bikinis and fit boys in board shorts flip-flopping by them on the way to the public waves.

 

Danny is distracted, Steve notices, but then, so is he—largely because Danny has a smear of sauce in the corner of his mouth, and Steve is having some difficulty resisting the urge to lick it off.

 

It’s heady, this rush of want, and a little off-putting, too.  Steve’s never been one for workplace romances.  Thanks to DADT, even if he’d found someone to scratch this itch, he wouldn’t have risked it.  Sure, there were random encounters on libo in some port city, an anonymous back-alley blowjob or mutual handjobs in a bathroom at the back of a club, but generally, Steve had kept himself to himself.

 

Looking at Danny, feeling the stir in his core, the zing of desire across the soles of his feet—it’s nice, hell, better than nice.  But it’s also worrisome.

  
“What?” Danny asks, catching Steve staring.

  
Steve gestures to the corner of his own mouth, and Danny, instead of wiping his mouth with the napkin in his free hand, licks the sauce away with his tongue.

 

Steve’s mouth goes dry and he feels his heart kicking against his ribs.  He looks away, focusing on a boogie-border who’s about to get walloped with a belly-slapper.

 

He startles when Danny nudges his foot under the table.

 

“You okay?”  The words traditionally express concern, but the tone and expression on Danny’s face make it clear he’s well aware of the effect he has on Steve, and he’s feeling pretty smug about it, too.

 

“Shut up,” he mutters, wiping his own mouth and balling up his garbage before collecting his empty bottle and standing up.  

 

“You need a minute?” Danny continues, trailing a little behind him.  Steve shoots him a look, and if he puts a touch more swagger than usual in his walk, it serves Danny right for teasing him in public.

 

“For a guy trained to withstand torture, you’re kind of easy to rile up,” Danny observes as he buckles his seatbelt.

 

It’s a fair point, and one that Steve will never acknowledge, but yeah, where Danny and this new thing between them are concerned, Steve’s pretty far gone.

 

Back in the Camaro, he actually has to keep his hands wrapped around the wheel and run wind-speed, velocity, and direction calculations to keep himself from peeling out of the parking lot and heading for his house, where he can strip Danny naked, throw him on the bed, and wipe the smirk off of his face in a mutually mind-blowing way.

 

When his phone rings, he reaches for it with more haste than grace, nearly fumbling it into Danny’s lap, which would totally defeat the purpose of answering it, since Steve would just have to tell whoever it was that he’d call them back later.

 

As it is, Chin says, “We’ve got it,” and Steve closes his eyes in relief. 

 

“Good, see you back at the Palace.”

 

They spend the afternoon attempting to gain more intel on Justice, to no avail, and planning the op before Steve calls it a day early and tells everyone to head home. 

 

“I’ll scout the location for a place to park the truck.  The rest of you get some sleep. We’ll meet a mile from the warehouse at 23:00 to coordinate comms.”

 

Chin and Kono seem pleased to obey, heading out into the afternoon sun.

 

Danny, arms crossed, hip against the smart table, gives Steve a look.  
  


  
“What?”  Steve stops halfway to his office and looks back at him.

 

“You planning to get any rest yourself?”  Danny’s wearing that puckered expression he gets when he thinks Steve is being stubborn.

 

“Why, you want to tuck me in?” he shoots back. 

 

Danny pushes himself upright in a smooth movement and closes the distance between them.  Steve thinks he’s just going to keep coming, and he’s already imagining the weight and heat of Danny right up against him when Danny stops, licks his lower lip quite deliberately, and says, “Meet you in the car,” before using Steve’s understandable distraction to pluck the keys from Steve’s pocket. 

 

Then he easily avoids Steve’s startled grab for him and whistles his way out of the room.

 

Mission to his office forgotten, Steve hastens to shut things down before leaving and makes it to the car in under three minutes.

 

Danny’s leaning up against it, smirk firmly in place, and Steve imagines sliding his cock between those lips and taking care of that look altogether.

 

Jesus, he has to get a grip…and not on Danny.

 

He wasn’t kidding about heading out to Sand Island, a fact with which Danny is surprisingly okay.

 

“No bitching?” Steve asks, slanting him a look.

 

“You’d be too restless to concentrate if I didn’t let you do this first,” Danny observes, and Steve isn’t sure which to take exception to first:  The implication that Steve can’t fuck and think at the same time or the assumption that Danny is letting Steve do his own goddamned job.

 

A second look reveals that Danny is obviously anticipating a blow-up, so Steve clamps his lips shut and focuses on the road.

 

The drive to Sand Island seems to take forever, but eventually they get to the warehouse and find a good hide, a spot behind a stack of two derelict shipping containers that offers a slightly obscured line of sight to the warehouse door, which is conveniently tagged with a red circle as an apparent sign to would-be partygoers.

 

Inside, they find about what you’d expect for a club that caters to vampires and their Minion wannabes.  After a thorough recon, they return to the truck.  If they’re rushing a little, it’s only because they want to get out of sight before they blow their cover.  Sure.

 

The drive to Steve’s takes even longer, possibly a glacial age.  Suns in distant galaxies die while they drive across town in the increasing traffic that precedes rush hour.

 

At last, they’re pulling up in front of the McGarrett residence, and as they get out, Steve says, “What do you want for dinner?”

 

Danny gives him a very clear look, and Steve has to swallow the sound that wants to crawl out of him at his body’s almost Pavlovian reaction to it.

 

In defiance of that reaction—and to reassert some control over his raging hormones (because he’s not some desperate teenager, for Christ’s sake)—Steve opens the door with no undue haste.  He sets his keys in the dish on the credenza by the door, moves through the house methodically opening sliding doors and windows, turning on ceiling fans, checking the usual places for signs of intrusion.

 

Danny is standing where Steve left him, just inside the front door.  His hands are loose at his sides, but he’s got a wary look in his eyes, like he’s expecting the unexpected.

 

“What?” Steve asks, faux innocent. 

 

“C’mere, you freak,” Danny answers, reaching out to snag Steve’s shirt and pull him in for a kiss.  Steve resists him for all of thirty seconds and then moves Danny until his back is against the door and Steve can press himself against him in a long, hot line of need and want.

 

Danny says, “Finally!” and Steve nips his lower lip for that, murmuring, “Come upstairs,” in his ear.

 

Then he steps back, resists the need to adjust himself in his cargo pants, and turns for the stairs.  
  


  
“Seriously?”  Danny’s outrage is almost funny, but Steve’s not laughing.  His head is on the way Danny had felt trapped against the door, the control Steve had had.  His breath comes faster as he thinks about all the ways they could explore that.

 

By the time Danny gets to the room, Steve has his back-up cuffs in his hand, dangling them by one finger.

 

“Seriously?” Danny asks again, but this time it’s a little breathless, and by the way his eyes widen and he moistens his lips automatically, Steve can tell he’s interested.

 

“Only if you want,” Steve says, and he means it—the idea of Danny helpless beneath him might get Steve going in a surprising and intriguing way, but if it does nothing for Danny, they can forget it ever came up.  Pun intended.

 

“Okay,” Danny answers, but it’s not exactly a ringing yes.

 

“Danny?”  Steve makes it clear that he needs something more explicit.

  
“Okay, yes, tie me up, strip me naked, do me, big guy—what more do you need?”  His hands are already undoing his buttons, and that’s distracting, so Steve loses the thread for a moment, but with the dogged determination beaten into him by long, miserable experience, he drags his mind back on track.

 

“Safeword?” Steve asks, and Danny pauses in his effort to get naked to roll his eyes.

  
“Steven, I trust you.”

 

And that is almost too much for Steve’s fraying self-control to handle, the way Danny says it, simple and sweet, like it should be obvious, like it doesn’t need to be said.

 

“Safeword,” he insists, taking off his gun and badge and putting them on the bedside table, stripping out of his shirt and reaching for the button on his pants, making it clear he can—and will—wait all day.

 

“Yellow,” Danny says, down to his boxers and socks.

 

“Yellow?”

 

“Like ‘yellow light’,” Danny explains, perhaps a little too readily.  Steve wonders if he’s had occasion to use safewords before.  The sharp jab of jealousy is almost shocking, and it makes him impatient.  All at once, he has to have Danny at his mercy. 

 

They’re done talking.

 

Steve’s headboard isn’t exactly designed for light bondage, so they improvise.  He lays Danny out on the bed, says, “Hands above your head.  Now,” and cuffs him, taking care that they aren’t too tight. 

 

Danny sucks in a harsh breath at the touch of the cold metal against his wrists, and Steve watches in interest as his already hard cock twitches a little at the sensation.

 

“Like that, huh?”

 

Danny swallows visibly and nods.

 

Steve busies himself with a tie he’d liberated from the closet, using it to loosely attach the chain between the cuffs to the metal frame under the box spring.  It’s a crap job and wouldn’t hold if Danny wanted to get away, but it’s apparent from the way his breathing has sped up and the diameter of his pupils that Danny isn’t interested in escape.

 

“Don’t pull too hard,” he warns before kneeling between Danny’s spread thighs and bending in half to kiss him the rest of the way breathless.

 

Danny tries to follow Steve when he pulls his mouth away, but Steve says, “No,” and slides his lips down Danny’s jaw to his neck and then further down to his nipple, which he sucks into his mouth.

 

Danny groans and bucks, says, “Fuuuck,” and Steve smiles around the tight nub in his mouth, nipping it before continuing his wet line of kisses down Danny’s chest and belly, licking a line to where his cock leaks pearly beads into the coarse hair there.

 

He sucks on the head, the flavor bursting across his tongue, making him moan and have to grip the base of his cock and squeeze.

 

Danny shouts, tries to thrust against Steve’s arm, which has pinned him across the hips.

 

Steve ignores him, sucking the head twice more for good measure before abandoning it in favor of moving further back, into the musky space where his balls draw up against his body.  Steve nuzzles Danny’s balls, sucks one and then the other, Danny squirming and babbling above him as he works.

 

When he spears Danny’s hole with his pointed tongue, Danny keens, and Steve does it again and again, getting him wet and messy, eating him out as thoroughly as he can.

 

When he emerges from between Danny’s thighs, Danny is a sweat-drenched, red-faced, panting mess, so fucking gorgeous Steve has to jerk his own balls down to stop himself from coming then and there.

 

He slicks his fingers and his cock, letting the lube drip onto Danny’s abdomen, which jumps with every drop.

 

Focusing on the tight clench of Danny’s body, Steve works one finger and then two inside him, searching for the spot that will make him scream, scissoring his fingers to stretch him.

 

Finally, Danny says, “Fuck, Steve, do-it-do-it-do-it,” and Steve obliges, lining himself up with a shaking hand and sliding the blunt tip of his cock into Danny’s hole before wiping his hands on the bedding and hauling Danny toward him by the perfect globes of his ass.  He works his way inside this way, hands on Danny’s ass pulling him onto his cock.

 

Danny is swearing and writhing in the cuffs, trying to get Steve to let him loose, but he hasn’t used the safeword, and Steve’s not letting him go unless he hears it. 

 

Steve has complete control, control he’s using to tease Danny’s prostate until Danny’s coherence breaks and he begins to beg.

 

Which he has sworn he will not do.

 

Never one to pass up a challenge, Steve is thinking about anything but the tight, clenching heat around his cock or the sanding his waist is getting from Danny’s leg hair or the way Danny’s abdomen ripples with effort as he tries to get Steve to slow down or speed up, go deeper or pull out farther.

 

With the patience of a sniper, Steve slows the pace until he’s making shallow dips with his hips, brushing every third or fourth stroke over Danny’s prostate.

  
The hair at Danny’s temples is dark with sweat, and his head is thrashing back and forth on the pillow as he says, “Steve, oh my god, Steve, fuck you—FUCK you.  Ohhh, fuck me, please, fuck me,” and Steve takes pity, lowering Danny’s ass to the bed, which reduces the depth of his thrusts but also frees up a hand to wrap around Danny’s cock.

 

At the first pull, Danny shouts, bucks up into the vise of Steve’s fingers, and comes.

 

His hole contracts around Steve, and Steve lets go of Danny’s softening cock to put both hands on the bed and put his back into fucking him into the mattress.

 

The headboard pounding against the wall with every thrust, Steve clenches his teeth, drives deep, and cries out, feeling his release from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, which he thinks might just explode altogether.

 

“Danny,” he moans as he comes and comes and comes, Danny writhing again beneath him, panting, “Jesus, I can feel it, you been savin’ up?”

 

Which is the very definition of anticlimax, Steve thinks, as he finishes and eases carefully out of Danny, mindful of the punishing pace he’d set and not wanting to hear about it every time he goes over a bump with the Camaro.

 

“You mind?” Danny asks even as Steve is gathering his wits—and his coordination—to undo the cuffs. 

 

Once free of them, Danny pulls Steve down for a kiss, disregarding the mess on his belly or the places Steve’s mouth has been.

 

Steve is spent—muscles lax, tension eased—but something in him stirs hot and vital and he gasps out a laugh and pulls away.  “Stop,” he says.  “We need to shower,” as he reluctantly disentangles them and helps Danny off the bed.

 

His partner’s progress to the bathroom is gratifyingly wobbly, and though Steve is hiding his masculine satisfaction, Danny says, “Shut up!” anyway.

 

Their shower is—mostly—all business, and when they emerge a few minutes later clean and more or less decent, Steve says, “What do you want for dinner?” and this time Danny gives him a practical answer.

 

They eat their takeout on the lanai straight from the red-lettered boxes.

 

“How can you manage to be barbaric and elegant at the same time?” Danny asks, mouth open a little as he watches Steve shovel food into his mouth with chopsticks.

 

Steve smiles with a mouthful, deliberately gross: “It’s a gift.”

 

“You’re disgusting,” Danny answers fondly, working away at his own meal with the time-honored cheap plastic fork that came with it.

 

When they’re done eating, mess stowed away, kitchen restored to Steve’s freakish neatness, they retire again to the lanai, though Steve’s bouncing knee betrays his anxiousness to get started with the night’s work.

 

A few minutes of tense quiet, and Danny clears his throat, which is usually prelude to him saying something Steve probably needs to hear but isn’t going to like.

  
This time, though, Danny says, “You know I love you?” with the question mark so clearly appended that Steve’s leg stills in its bouncing, all that anxiety rushing to his stomach, instead.

 

Suddenly, he wishes he hadn’t eaten so much chicken pineapple curry.

 

Still, he’s been known to be brave to the point of foolishness, so he says, “I sense a but…”

 

He catches Danny’s acknowledging head-bob out of the corner of his eye and tries to brace himself for the hurt he knows is coming.

 

“This thing between us is pretty intense.”  And Danny is stalling, which can only mean it’s going to be _really_ bad, whatever he’s got to say.

 

“It is,” Steve concurs, shot through with a visceral sense memory of Danny’s thighs around his hips.

 

“And we—and by _we_ , I mostly mean _you_ —aren’t always great at impulse control.”

 

Steve would argue, but his tongue is two sizes two big and his throat too dry to work up the saliva.

 

“So, I think we need some ground rules if we’re going to continue.”

 

 _If_?

 

Steve thinks that if his jaw muscles get any tighter, they’re going to snap like broken rubberbands, but he blows out a slow breath through his nose and nods.  It’s the only response he can manage.

  
“Oh, my god, will you relax?  I’m not breaking up with you, you big putz, I’m just asking that we refrain from plowing each other’s asses on nights when we have big missions to execute.”

 

Actually…

 

“Fair point,” Steve concedes, letting some of the tension seep out of his face and neck.

 

Also?

 

“Each other’s?”  His stomach flips from anxious to excited so fast he thinks he might be sick from it, and he has to take a couple of deep breaths to get it to settle.

 

“Is that something you want?” Danny asks.  “Because I’d definitely be interested, but, you know, if you’re not into it, I’m not gonna—”

 

“NO!”  Steve hastens to assure him, and then realizes the ambiguity of his response.  “I mean, yes, that’s something I could— _we_ could…do.”

 

“Try not to sound so enthusiastic there, Babe.” 

 

Danny sounds…careful, which is a habit of Danny’s that Steve hates.  He knows when his partner puts on that tone, he—Steve—has said or done something that’s made Danny cautious of being hurt himself.

 

“I am—enthusiastic, I mean.  Completely, totally on board with you, uh, plowing me into the mattress.”

 

Danny shifts a little in his seat, and Steve can’t tell if it’s sexual excitement or physical discomfort causing the movement.

 

Which is the reason they’re having this conversation at all, Steve recalls.

 

“But your point is well taken.  We should probably be a little more…Spartan…in our approach to the more, um, athletic of our activities.” 

 

“So, body oil and piercings?” Danny teases, and Steve chuffs out a laugh, more breath than sound, and they go back to staring at the rolling waves, only now the silence is tense for a different reason, at least on Steve’s side, because he’s thinking about what it’s going to feel like to have Danny fuck him until he can’t sit comfortably, and that is a train of thought he’d better derail right now.

 

“We should probably…” he offers lamely, gesturing vaguely toward the driveway.

  
“Yeah, definitely,” Danny says, getting up a little stiffy.  Steve does a surreptitious once-over to make sure he’s not, in fact, injured.  Wouldn’t do to go into a potential firefight with a mobility issue, no matter how proud Steve might be of his part in creating that situation.

 

What he sees is that Danny’s stiffness is…localized.  Which makes him, yeah, smug—and also not a little hard himself.

 

Jesus, they have _got_ to go shoot something.

 

*****

 

Unfortunately, the night’s mission turns out to be 95% sitting in the surveillance truck listening to crappy club electronica broken only by Chin’s or Kono’s commentary on what and who they’re seeing.

 

Steve is a professional.  He’s spent literally days stewing in his own bodily fluids, laying completely still and letting insects bite his tender parts.  He never gave up his position by needing to scratch an itch.

 

This itch, though, the full-color, surround-porn-sound of their earlier activities coupled with a powerful sense memory of sinking into Danny’s tight, hot ass…that makes it a little hard to focus, which, in turn, makes Steve irritable.

 

“Do you see anything at all relevant to the case?” he asks for the third time in three hours.

 

Chin’s abrupt, “No, _sir_ ,” tells Steve he’s being a dick even before Danny sucks his teeth and shakes his head in Steve’s general direction.

 

“Wait,” Chin amends.  “I think I see a vampire.”

 

“More than one,” Kono adds.  “They’re hanging out in a group near the door that leads to the private area in the back.”

 

“Anyone look like he might be called ‘Justice’?” Steve asks.

 

“We’ll find out,” Kono promises.

 

“Be careful,” Steve cautions.

 

“Copy that,” the two answer in tandem.

 

The deep bass thumping of the music fades a little as they cross to the rear of the dance space, where Steve and Danny had found a door leading to a long hallway partitioned into what once must have been used as offices.  Now, as they’d discovered in their earlier recon of the place, each room sports a broken-down couch or musty futon, stained pillows, scarred tables, half-melted candles, and the like.

 

“Looks like a flophouse,” Danny had remarked, but Steve had shaken his head, made a negative sound, and pointed to stains on the cushions and pillows.

 

“Smell it?” Steve had asked, and Danny had wrinkled his nose and grimaced.

 

“Blood,” Steve had added.  “This is where they bring the willing ‘donors.’”

 

Danny had made a gagging motion, and they’d checked seven identical rooms for any signs of other activities.

 

Besides the obvious stale sex stench in the air, they’d found nothing, not a single needle, spoon, or baggie.

 

Now, holding his breath in the truck, Steve hears Kono say, “Hey, is this where we go for a good time?”

 

She’s pitched her voice low and husky, which is apparently effective, for someone says, “Sure, sweetcheeks,” and then, “Let her through.”

 

“Nuh-uh,” Kono demurs.  “My coz comes with me, or I don’t go.  It’s okay, though—he’s fun, too.”

 

A brief moment of silence is broken by a grunt.

  
“Fine.  Let ‘em both through.”

 

“Thanks, Mr.—” Kono lets it hang, and she’s rewarded for her cheek when the unidentified voice answers, “Call me Justice.”

 

Danny rolls his eyes.  “You believe this guy?  Sounds like a reject from a Leone film.”

 

Steve grunts his acknowledgement, too focused on what they’re getting from the wires to give Danny much of his attention.

 

“Nice digs,” Kono says after the sounds of walking have faded to a few desultory scuffs against the warehouse’s concrete floor.  She sounds a little put out.

 

“Don’t like it, don’t party with us,” someone says, and Kono says, “What’s your name, big guy?”

 

“Good girl,” Danny murmurs, appreciating her identification technique for the listeners trapped in the truck.

 

“Titus,” the guy answers.  “You ready?”

 

“Whoa!” Kono says.  “Not so fast.  We gonna talk ground rules here, or what?”  
  


“Sure.  Here’s the rules:  I bite you, and when I’m done, you get these.”

 

A faint crinkling sound reaches them.

 

“Scarlets?” Chin supplies:  Scarlet is the street name for vampire blood capsules, said to offer whoever takes them a few minutes of sharper sight and hearing, more speed and agility, and greater strength.  The unfortunate side effects of coming down include an insatiable desire for blood and a truly inconvenient oversensitivity to sunlight.

 

“Yeah,” Titus answers, impatience in his voice.  “You in or what?  I’ll do you too, if you want more.”

 

“Generous offer,” Chin answers, “But no.”

 

There ensues some scuffling, thuds, grunts, and a long-drawn-out sigh before Kono says, “We’re clear.  He’s down.”

 

“Get out of there,” Steve orders.  “Bring the Scarlets.”

 

“Already on it, Boss,” Kono says, even as Chin answers, “Copy that,” followed by, “Back door,” obviously directed at his cousin.

  
Their rapid footsteps signal a swift retreat, and Steve lets out the breath he’s been holding when he hears the rear door of the warehouse open.

 

Then, “Wait,” Kono hisses, and the normally unflappable Chin says, “Shit.”

 

“Steve, it’s John.  He’s talking to two humans back here by the dumpsters.  I can’t make out what he’s saying.  I’ll try to get closer.”  Chin’s voice doesn’t betray the turmoil Steve imagines that he must be feeling; he’s learned over the months they’ve known each other how much John’s mentorship meant to Chin.

 

He’s a little ashamed to admit that he’d been jealous of their closeness.  Now, he worries that it’s making Chin uncharacteristically careless.

 

“Wait!” Steve orders, but when neither of them responds, he feels his chest tighten and icy prickles spreading across his shoulders.

 

This time, when he tears off the headphones and turns to open the back door, Danny doesn’t try to stop him.  He’s right there with him, jumping out, closing the door quietly, drawing his gun, and following almost soundlessly behind.

 

They move swiftly through the open space between the surveillance truck’s hide and the side of the warehouse nearest them.  Keeping close to the wall, skirting rusted barrels, engine parts, and the detritus of years of neglect, they come to the back corner, around which Steve peers carefully.  The back wall of the warehouse faces a disused shipping channel, and like the wall down which they’ve come, it’s blocked with debris.

 

He can’t see anything, but through the comms he hears the quiet shuffle of his team trying to move quietly.  
  


  
It won’t matter:  Steve’s father’s a vampire, and an apparently powerful one for all that he was only recently turned.  He must know they’re there already.

 

“Chin, Kono, hold your positions.”

 

Neither responds.

 

Danny taps him on the shoulder, and Steve moves around the corner, tucking himself behind a dumpster overflowing with trash.

 

A rat scurries from the shadows.

 

Danny touches him again, and Steve move around the dumpster, sighting down the barrel of his gun for potential targets.

 

There’s a listing stack of crates blocking his view, and as he flattens himself against it, feeling Danny slide in behind him, Steve peeks around the edge of them, wishing he had night vision goggles to aid his sight.

 

Still, he can see nothing.

  
“Chin, Kono, you copy?”

 

Still no response.

 

The iciness spreads down his spine, and Steve resists the urge to shake the sensation off.  He’s always hated this feeling, the strange dread that sometimes overtakes him before action.  It usually presages something going sideways—and Steve always proceeds despite the dire warning.  He can’t be ruled by superstition, even when he’s hunting a creature out of legend.

 

When they clear the crates, Steve catches a glimpse of movement, so sudden and fleeting that he might have thought he’d imagined it except for the accompanying noise of feet brushing against concrete in his ear.  Someone is moving up ahead:  Someone or some _thing_.

 

They pass the warehouse door that Chin and Kono would have used, and scan though he might, Steve finds no sign of their passing.

 

Ahead, a rusty forklift molders to ruin in their line of sight, and Steve swears internally as the sensation of uneasiness spreads across his lower back and down his ass, raising the hairs on the backs of his thighs.

 

He holds up a fist to stop them and peers through the intense murk, trying to make out any of the forms ahead of them.

 

None of them appear to be moving, so at Danny’s tap, Steve moves again, still skirting the crap stacked along the wall, trying to watch his feet and his sightlines at the same time, pausing now and then to scan the skyline above, half expecting to see snipers or monsters silhouetted against the lighter opacity of the cloud cover overhead.

 

Nothing.

 

They reach the far edge of the warehouse without seeing anyone or anything lurking in the shadows.

 

“Chin, Kono, come in,” he commands, keeping his tone even with some effort.

 

He hears his own voice, tiny and muffled, coming from around the corner of the warehouse.  Danny’s hand on his shoulder, Steve ducks out, checks for bad guys, sees nothing but more garbage piled against the wall, and slithers around the corner like the well-trained lethal killing machine that the Navy made him.

 

On the ground he finds two wires and two earbuds in a tangled pile on the holey lid of a barrel.  The death’s-head symbol grinning back at him warns him that the barrel had once held something toxic.

 

Now, it holds something far, far more worrisome, and Steve gathers the electronic equipment in one gloved hand, almost cradling it, as if he could ensure his team’s safety by taking care of this evidence of their abduction.

 

Behind him, Danny is murmuring into his phone, quietly putting out a BOLO for Chin and Kono.  Steve can’t speak, can’t say that he thinks it’s a useless step, because the cold has finally reached his diaphragm, and he’s having trouble sucking in any air at all.

 

He pockets the surveillance equipment, moving on autopilot toward the truck, Danny ominously silent in his wake.

 

It’s not until they’re seated in the front, Steve behind the wheel, that Danny puts a hand on his arm, squeezing, and says, “They’ll be okay, Steve.  Your dad’ll take care of them.”

 

But Steve’s not so sure anymore what his father will or will not do, not clear on what John McGarrett’s motives are in all of this.

 

He only knows that Chin and Kono are in trouble, and he and Danny are their best bet in winning free of the creatures that have taken them.

 

Still, he voices none of his fears, swallowing against the lead weight in his throat and starting the truck, jaw set, eyes on the road.

 

“They’ll be okay,” Danny repeats, but Steve can hear in his voice that he’s saying it like he needs to convince himself as much as Steve.

 

Steve nods, the truck bouncing onto the road, rattling his teeth in his head.

 

“We’ll head back to the Palace,” he says, voice sounding strangely flat.  “Try to see if any cameras picked up a vehicle leaving the warehouse around the time they’d have been taken.”

 

“Good,” Danny says.  “If we find something, maybe you can get Catherine to repurpose a satellite for you?”

 

Steve says, “Sure,” but he’s not. 

 

“Hey,” Danny says.  “Hey, we’ll find them, okay?  We’re going to find them.”

 

“Sure,” Steve says again, hands tight on the wheel.  He can feel a vein beneath his eye fluttering, and his mouth is dry, tongue sticking to his teeth.

 

Danny doesn’t try again to offer words of empty comfort, and they ride the rest of the way to the Palace in the kind of silence Steve’s only experienced a few times before, when sharing a cargo bay with the remains of a buddy and the rest of his shocked and anguished team.


	5. Chapter Five

It’s too easy to track the stolen, bright blue utility truck John McGarrett had strong-armed Chin and Kono into.  It even has a giant black 7 on top, circled in white.  Steve isn’t reckless enough to ignore the obvious, and Danny’s cop-sense is tingling, so they take a few minutes to argue the merits of calling up SWAT.

 

“That depends—your dad going to kill them if he sees cops?” Danny asks.  He has the good grace to look at Steve when he asks, and Steve appreciates the forthrightness, even if the question itself is painful.

 

It’s more painful that he isn’t sure of the answer.

 

“My father?  No way.  The vampire he’s become?  Danny, I have no idea.”

 

Danny nods.  “Okay, good.  Right.  So, there’s no way this blue truck you could see from space isn’t a lure.  They know we know where they are, and if we go in with an army, people are going to get hurt.  So, we do it small and quiet.  Question is, how?”

  
 

“I can go in alone,” Steve says, and before he even finishes his sentence, Danny is objecting.  
  


  
“No.  No way.  Where your father’s concerned, Steven, you don’t think straight.  You, my friend, who are otherwise all about control just…lose it around him.  So no, I don’t think going in alone is the answer.”

 

Steve doesn’t like Danny’s observation, but he can’t really argue with it, given recent experience.  Even so, there are only so many options available to them.

 

“So, what:  We just wait around until the vamps get bored and kill Chin and Kono?  Or turn them?”

 

Danny grimaces at that last part, and Steve empathizes.  He can think of few things worse—including death—than to be made into a monster against his will.  Given how often he’s had teeth in him lately, Steve knows from loss of control.  No, thank you.

 

“Look,” he says, choosing his next words like an offering. “My father knew we’d be watching.  He knew if he took Chin and Kono, we’d come.  He made sure we could follow them by stealing that truck.  That’s got to be a message that we’re meant to come.  He must want us or need us there.  If we’re smart about it—if we gear up, do the recon, go in quiet, we might be able to figure out what’s going down before we have to show ourselves.”

 

“There are a lot of ifs in that plan,” Danny answers, but it’s not strictly an objection.  He looks unhappy—deeply, powerfully unhappy—but he’s not saying ‘no.’

 

“We wait until dawn, which is,” Steve consults his watch, “two hours away.  That should reduce the number of low-level vamps up and about.”

 

“They’ll have planned for that.  The place will be crawling with Minions.  And you can bet they’ll be armed to the teeth.”

 

Steve had long ago noted that it seemed like there were more illegal automatic weapons on the island than there were people, so he’s expecting a firefight.

 

“Minions we can handle,” he says.

 

“Okay,” Danny says, meaning the opposite.  But he doesn’t offer any further arguments.

 

“We should get some rest.”  Even as he says it, Steve knows he’s not sleeping.

 

Danny makes an inelegant sound that calls Steve’s bullshit, and despite the dire circumstances, the exhaustion starting to drag him down, and his worry over his teammates’ conditions, Steve smiles.  It’s a weak thing, but it serves to make Danny’s expression lighten a little, too, and he bumps into Steve purposefully as he moves toward his office.

  
Steve hooks him by the biceps and turns Danny toward him, wrapping him in a hug and dropping his cheek to Danny’s hair.

 

It’s a sign of Danny’s own worry that he doesn’t complain about Steve flattening his hair.

 

They stay like that for a long time, Steve feeling some of the tension leach out of him at Danny’s grounding touch.  There’s nothing sexual in it; this contact is all about comfort.

 

Only when his neck starts to twinge does Steve ease away and release Danny, who sways a little in place before catching himself.

 

“Resting” turns out to look a lot like brooding, Steve on his side of the desk, Danny on the couch with his feet up on one of the chairs he’d pulled over for that purpose.  
  


  
There’s not much by way of talk:  They’re too keyed up for small talk, too far out from go-time for planning.  They abide in a strange in-between space.  Steve starts to notice Danny’s breathing, begins to match his own with his partner’s.  He looks at the crow’s feet starting at the corners of Danny’s eyes and has a fierce, momentary longing to see him smile full-out.

 

The alarm on his phone pings the thirty-minute warning, and they get up together and gear up, talking only to ask about extra ammunition and effective range on the crossbows they’ve liberated from downstairs storage and fitted with steel-tipped wooden arrows.

 

“Maximum puncture load,” Chin had called them when he’d suggested they carry some weapons less “apocalyptic” than Steve’s preferred flamethrower.

 

In the Camaro, Steve plugs in the coordinates of the defunct sugar refinery that had been the final destination of the big blue truck.  It’s fifteen minutes from the Palace in pre-dawn traffic.

 

They pull up a quarter mile from the refinery, leaving the car behind a dumpster in an alley next to a closed porn shop, and walk the remaining distance on foot, giving the refinery a wide berth.  Before they cross the fifty feet of open cracked asphalt, Steve hunkers down and takes a deep breath.

 

He’s always loved dawn on the island.  The air has a held-breath tension to it, like every possibility is pent up waiting for him to make his day’s choices.  When he lets it out, some of his fear goes with it, and he gives Danny a smile that he’s sure looks a little manic.

 

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Danny says.

 

What he means, of course, is _I love you_.

 

“You either,” Steve answers, meaning the same. 

 

Then they jog across the open space between them and the building where Chin and Kono are being held.

 

Google maps had shown them the best point of entry would be an honest-to-god bomb shelter repurposed for storage, with a separate, sunken entrance on the back wall of the refinery. 

 

If they hadn’t already figured it was a trap, the fact that no one appears to be stationed on the perimeter or doing security sweeps would have alerted them.

 

Steve makes quick work of the chain, using the bolt-cutters he’d brought for that purpose.  Danny’s hand is steady on the Maglite.

 

The door scrapes open with a scream that slices open the pre-dawn stillness.

 

“Great,” Danny mutters, but whether he’s remarking on the noise or on the narrow tunnel his light reveals, Steve isn’t sure.

 

“NVGs,” Steve says, and Danny flicks off the light and drops his goggles over his eyes just as Steve does the same.

  
  
The air in the tunnel is dense and stale, their feet moving through what is probably several decades’ worth of dried rat shit.  The dust obscures their sight, reducing the range of their goggles.

 

Thankfully, the tunnel lets out at a bunker packed with tall metal shelves that seem in imminent danger of collapse, loaded as they are with outdated electronic equipment, machine parts, file boxes half-chewed for nest material, and objects Steve isn’t sure the origins or use of.

 

Even moving carefully, his shoulder brushes a rack, and it sways alarmingly, metal squealing in protest, before he’s able to wrestle it to a standstill.

 

They share a harsh exhale of relief and move on.

 

A door on the far side of the room is jammed half-open, cock-eyed in its frame.  They work their way through the opening and up six concrete stairs to another door, this one firmly closed.

 

The handle doesn’t turn when he tries it, and Danny whispers, “Let me,” holding his penlight in his mouth and pulling out his lockpicks.

 

It takes him a minute to get the lock open, but when he does, the handle turns surprisingly easily, and the door itself opens outward with almost no sound.

 

There is no one on the other side waiting for them.

 

No one lurks in the short hallway ahead of them, at the end of which is yet another door, this one conveniently open.

 

Likewise, when they emerge onto the refinery floor, shadowed by the hulking remains of defunct machinery, there is also no sign of life.

 

They pause, Steve listening for any indication of what direction they should head:  The place is huge and full of monstrous shadows that loom greenly out of the darkness through their goggles.

 

He takes point, Danny’s tap on his shoulder letting him know he’s ready to move out, and because they have no trail to follow, Steve chooses to go left, figuring they’ll recon the perimeter before moving toward the center in a grid pattern.

 

A few long minutes into their search, Steve becomes aware that the quality of vision provided by the goggles is reduced by a pale, dirty light washing in through the high, broken windows overhead.  He pauses and flips his NVGs up, Danny following suit, and then indicates that they should continue.

 

The silence is oppressive, the faint scuffle of their feet almost thunderous in the immense, echoing quiet of the refinery.  Catwalks crisscross overhead, and Steve keeps an eye on those, waiting to see figures backlit by the dawn.

 

Still, there is nothing.

 

They’re almost back to where they’d started when there’s a faint, faraway tinkling nose, like someone on the other side of the building had dropped a metal washer into an empty oil drum.

 

They stop, Steve taking one side, Danny the other, scanning the half-dark for any movement.

 

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” a cultured voice singsongs.  The words reverberate weirdly in the irregular space between machines.

 

Steve peers around the corner of a rusting metal tank to see an Asian vampire in a bespoke suit standing in a shaft of moted light.

 

He’s showing off, obviously—even old vampires suffer irritation at the sun.

 

Kono is bound to a steel office chair to the vamp’s right, Chin similarly trussed on the right.  They’re both gagged and blindfolded.

 

There are no other figures in sight, but Steve thinks he can feel the weight of other eyes on him.

 

Steve uses hand signals to indicate that he’s going to draw the vampire’s attention and that Danny should circle around in the dark to come up behind the vampire. 

 

Danny looks grim and worried, but he nods tightly and fades back into the shadows, while Steve steps boldly out into the aisle that runs down the center of the refinery, huge vats to either side dwarfing him as he walks.

 

He takes his time, eyes watching the darkness for movement, scanning Chin and Kono for visible injuries, and tracking the vampire who is standing with perfect ease, as though Steve isn’t holding a crossbow in his two capable hands.

  
  
“Ah, I see the family resemblance,” the vampire says as Steve enters the hazy circle of brighter light afforded, he can now see, by a missing roof panel.

 

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Steve asks, mostly so Chin and Kono can know that he’s there.

 

“That’s right, we haven’t been formally introduced.  Why don’t we let your father do the honors?” 

 

The vamp gestures gracefully toward the shadows behind Chin, and John McGarrett appears as though born of them, moving to stand behind and to the vampire’s left hand, out of direct light.

 

“Son,” the monster that was Steve’s father says, “This is Wo Fat, Master of Honolulu.  Master, this is my son, Steve.”

 

This is the first time he’s seen his father without blood loss interfering with his vision.  John McGarrett is pale—no surprise there—but otherwise fit, looking older than Steve remembers but not like the years are weighing on him.

 

His father is wearing a neutral expression, nothing welcoming but nothing unwelcoming, either, in his eyes or around his mouth.

 

“Dad,” Steve manages, though his throat his suddenly dry.

 

Then he turns his attention to Wo Fat.  Steve’s holding the crossbow in the ready position, not aiming at anything in particular but able to bring the weapon to bear at a moment’s notice.  It lends authority to his next words.

 

“Let them go,” Steve says.  “They have nothing to do with this.”

 

Wo Fat smiles and shakes head, a moue of feigned disappointment telegraphing his words.

 

“Now, now, what sort of fool do you take me for?  Chin Ho Kelly is a friend of your father’s, almost a second son—one might say the replacement for the one he threw away.  And Ms. Kalakaua is your protégé, if I’m not mistaken.  They have as much to do with what’s about to happen here as you yourself do, Steve.”

 

He’s using Steve’s first name to get under his skin, but it has the opposite effect, mostly because it shows just how little he knows about Steve McGarrett, who has never cared much for protocol unless he’s following orders.  Left to his own devices, he doesn’t spend much time worrying about social niceties.

 

“Why don’t you put down the crossbow?  I assure you, your friends would be dead long before you could land a shot, never mind a killing one.”

 

Steve looks to John for confirmation, but his father gives him nothing, staring at the middle distance like Steve isn’t even there.

 

He crouches to set the crossbow down, and Wo Fat makes a gesture to indicate that he should kick it away.

 

The ubiquitous black zip-tie appears in John’s hands, and Steve doesn’t resist when his father tightens it around his wrists.  Steve’s counting on the long game here and hoping he hasn’t terribly misjudged his father.  
  
  


Wo Fat snaps his fingers like he’d forgotten something vital.

 

“I believe we’re still one man short.  Detective Williams, why don’t you join us?”

 

Wo Fat’s suggestion is answered with silence of the listening kind.

 

“If you don’t come out right now, I’ll send John after you, and I assure you, you won’t like that half as much as he will.”

 

There’s something almost lascivious in his voice, and Steve looks hard at his father to see what John’s reaction might be.

 

His father might as well be made of stone for all the expression he offers.

 

Wo Fat leans forward at the waist as though about to impart a naughty secret, his eyes lighting up with lewd glee as he stage-whispers, “For such a young vampire, your father is particularly skilled at the hunt.  He likes to play with his food before he eats it.  But then, I hear you’ve already learned that firsthand.”

 

Steve tries not to let any of what he’s feeling show on his face, but the skin across his shoulders is prickling and a wash of cold is spilling down his back, making him have to tighten his core muscles to keep from shivering.

 

Wo Fat’s expression seems satisfied, almost gloating, so Steve thinks his effort must have been wasted.

 

Still, his voice is even when he says, “Danny, it’s okay.  You can come out now.”  He’s beginning to believe there will be only small victories in this encounter.

 

Danny strolls into the dusty light like he’s meeting the team for flag football, the crossbow tapping with deceptive casualness against his leg as he walks.

 

“Ah-ah-ah,” Wo Fat chides, shaking his finger back and forth like a nineteenth century schoolmarm.  “Put the hardware down.”

 

Danny does as he’s told, kicking it away from him for good measure—not toward the assembled group but out into the dark, where it wangs off a machine before quiet descends once more.

 

“Take care of him,” Wo Fat orders, and Steve takes a breath to protest, but John is on Danny in a blur of motion, and before he can say more than, “You said—,” Danny is zip-tied and gagged on his knees next to Kono.

 

Steve tries to communicate an apology with his eyes, which Wo Fat intercepts with a saccharine smile.

 

“Isn’t that sweet?” he purrs, stalking around Steve like he’s sizing up a cow for the slaughter.  The naked hunger on his face has nothing to do with an appetite for blood, though.  Steve’s seen that look before on a sadistic bastard in a tent in Sudan right before the longest night of his life.

 

When the threat comes, Steve is expecting it and doesn’t react.

 

“I want the names of every vampire you’ve interrogated, investigated, and/or incarcerated in that little box in your basement,” Wo Fat says.  “You’re going to give them to me because if you do not, I’m going to let your father prove his loyalty to me in ways that you will find most inconducive to your comfort.”

 

Wo Fat has made another mistake in threatening Steve first.  If he’d put pressure on any of the others, Steve might give something up out of fear for their lives, but Steve’s been intimately acquainted with pain on many occasions, and this one won’t be any worse than those others, he tells himself.

 

He assumes parade rest, puts on the thousand-yard stare he’d learned in order to ride out the spittle and screams of slavering drill instructors out to make him ring the bell.

 

John is behind him before Steve registers his movement.  His father’s hand at the nape of his neck is cold, his lips colder, and Steve just manages to stop himself from jumping when he feels the mouth fasten at the top of his shoulder.

 

He does jump when teeth pierce him, but he tries to relax into the feeling, waits for the uncomfortable pleasure he’s learned is normal in these circumstances.

  
  
It doesn’t come.

 

John’s teeth begin to drag through his flesh, and he understands then that his father doesn’t intend to just suck his blood.  He worries at the muscle, teeth scraping on Steve’s collarbone, and Steve makes an involuntary noise, a sort of loud swallow as the pain worms under his guard.

 

Steve shifts his stance to stay upright and tries to slide his mind into the cold, empty space he sends it when he’s suffering prolonged pain, but something about his father’s other hand, the one at his waist, distracts him from going under all the way. 

  
There’s almost a quality of kindness in the touch, a sort of gentle caress he wouldn’t expect.

  
Steve wonders if he’s misjudged his father, if he is, in fact, all monster, none of the man he was left in him.  Because while his father could be cold and hard on Steve, he had never been deliberately cruel, but this touch, implying love, suggesting affection but acting opposite the obvious—the way John is gnawing like a rabid dog on Steve’s flesh—well, that’s a mindfuck of a whole other sort.

 

Steve blows out a breath, trying again to let go of the pain, to get under where he can’t feel it except as a distant throb. 

 

John pinches his waist, and it seems just another ridiculous indignity until he realizes his father’s touch is deliberately sporadic, signaling words in a language John himself taught Steve when Steve was barely old enough to know his letters.

 

In Morse code, John is saying:  _Hang on.  Help comes_.

 

Steve makes what looks like an abortive move to pull his father’s hand away from his body, using the motion to mask his answering _OK_.

 

“Enough,” Wo Fat orders, and John pulls his mouth away with an obscene, wet sound.   Only then does Steve hear Danny’s inarticulate shouts.  Danny is straining against his bonds, leaning forward over his knees, almost overbalanced in the effort to get free.

 

“I’ve obviously underestimated your training, Steve,” Wo Fat observes, as if he’s remarking on the latest sports scores.

 

“Let’s make this more interesting, shall we?” he asks.  Steve’s heart sinks, but he keeps his eyes from looking at Danny, Kono, and Chin, hoping against hope that Danny’s frantic display hasn’t given the vampire any ideas.

  
  
But Wo Fat doesn’t move toward his team.

 

John is still standing biting-close to Steve, and Steve still has his feet spread to keep himself upright.  He can feel blood soaking his shirt and knows that whatever healing properties John’s bite should have, they aren’t working now.

 

Maybe he’s chewed through an important artery, Steve thinks.  Or maybe the healing thing can be turned on and off.

 

Whatever the case, he’s bleeding more than is healthy, and his father is, for the moment, doing nothing to change that.

 

Steve hopes his father’s help comes in time.

 

Wo Fat sidles up to where father and son stand, close enough that Steve can smell the vampire’s cologne.  Without looking at Steve at all, Wo Fat leans toward him, as if he’s going to whisper something in Steve’s ear.

 

But his next words aren’t directed at Steve.

 

“Since you’ve proved extraordinary as a fledgling, let’s test the limits of your powers, shall we?” the vampire asks.

 

Steve is watching Wo Fat’s face, but the reaction he’s looking for comes from his father, who takes in a startled breath.

 

“Drain him and turn him, John.  Prove to me once and for all where your true loyalty lies.”

 

Since Steve has generally been more interested in killing vampires rather than making more of them, he hasn’t read much on turning, but he knows it’s traditionally a process left to only the oldest and most experienced vampires, and even then, the margin of error—wherein error means certain death for the turnee—is high.

 

That may be why John sounds a little gruff when he says, “As you command, Master.”

 

Maybe Wo Fat hasn’t spent enough time around John McGarrett to hear the undercurrent of sarcasm in the way he inflects the title, but it gives Steve hope that whatever plan his father is enacting, it’s going to happen soon.

 

In any case, given his blood loss, the threat to his team—to _Danny_ —and the fact that he’s unarmed and bound, Steve guesses he doesn’t have many options but to trust his father.

 

If only he had any real practice with that…

 

This time, his father wraps an arm around him and pulls Steve back against his chest.  Steve tries to relax into the hold, tries not to let the intimacy do things to his head.  The McGarrett men had never been big on physical affection, and it seems bitterly ironic to Steve that this is the first embrace he can recall getting from his father in a long, long time.

 

Steve tells himself it’s all an act, that the cavalry—whoever they are—will arrive at any moment and interrupt this travesty of paternal concern.

 

Still, when his father’s mouth fastens over Steve’s jugular vein and the first zing of pleasure arcs through him, Steve can’t help the noise of denial he makes.  He doesn’t want this, doesn’t want his father’s touch, this parody of love, the induced comfort the vampire’s bite initiates.

  
  
He says, “Don’t.  Not like this,” and his father pulls away long enough to say, “Fine,” in a tight voice.

 

The exchange earns an elegant snort from Wo Fat, who sneers, “Touching,” before stepping back, presumably to avoid being splattered should the bite go wrong.

 

When Steve’s father’s teeth sink into his neck this time, it hurts like hell.  It shouldn’t be possible that Steve can feel the blood being sucked from his body, but the sensation persists, growing from a slight burn to a sensation like shrapnel tearing its way out of his body with every pull.

 

Steve clamps his teeth shut and swallows a groan of pain.  He blows out a hard breath and closes his eyes, struggling to find distance from what’s happening to him.

 

The darkness behind his eyelids does nothing to offer comfort, only amplifies the sounds of Danny’s struggles.  He seems to be screaming behind his gag, and Steve levers his eyes opened, alarmed by how heavy his lids feel, to make sure that Wo Fat isn’t tormenting his partner.

 

Well, beyond the obvious killing-Steve-by-proxy thing that’s going on in front of him, that is.

 

Danny sees Steve looking and stills, fixing him with an anguished gaze.  Steve tries to communicate by look that things will be fine, but creeping blackness is narrowing his vision, and he realizes he’s about to pass out just before he becomes dead weight.

 

His father grunts and takes his weight, apparently effortlessly, and Steve has a strange moment of anti-gravity, like he’s being rocked in cradling darkness, before the concrete floor rushes up to meet the back of his skull.

 

Then, the darkness is all.

 

*****

 

Steve would like to say he was awake and aware for his rescue.

  
He’d like to be able to tell the story of the epic battle between Five-0 and Wo Fat’s forces.

 

Since he was unconscious for all of it, however, the best he can do is listen to his team taking turns telling him how things went down while he was staining the refinery floor with his blood.

 

“I thought we were done for,” Danny is saying, referring to the moment after John dropped Steve’s seemingly lifeless body and a dozen shadows had detached from the dark around the machines and resolved into Minions.

 

“I had no idea what you were shouting about,” Chin says.  “And man, was I confused when John undid my blindfold and hands.”

 

Chin had apparently cut his ankles free with the jackknife John slipped him and then undid Danny’s zip-ties while Wo Fat was posturing at the tightening ring of Minions.

  
Chin took care of Kono while Danny went to Steve.

 

“You weren’t bleeding anymore.”  Danny swallows hard.  “You were cold to the touch.”  His hesitation is painful to watch.  “I thought you were dead,” Danny says, anguished and subdued, and Steve reaches out a hand, clinging weakly but not letting go.  He’s still woozy, lightheaded and seeing flashes of darkness at the edge of his vision, but the doctors say he’ll be fine with another pint.

 

The ugly wound at his collarbone is almost healed, courtesy of John, apparently.

 

“After the Minions ran Wo Fat off, John ordered two of them to tail him and sent the rest to their safehouse,” Chin picks up, giving Danny a moment to compose himself.

 

“Then he knelt down where I was holding you in my lap,” Danny resumes, “and said, ‘Let me.’  What was I going to say?  ‘No, you freak, you’ve done enough damage?’”  Danny’s protests are half-hearted, and from that alone, Steve knows how scared he was, how much it affected him to watch Steve “die.”

 

“I was trying to tell you,” Steve whispers.  He wants to say _I’m sorry.  I wish I could have made it easier for you.  I won’t do it again._ He doesn’t have the breath for more. 

  
  
Danny nods around Steve’s words and goes on like he didn’t say anything at all.

 

“He sort of…licked…”  Danny’s face is a contorted into the perfect image of disgust “…the wound there and then…kissed?...your neck, where he’d bitten you.”

 

“And then he was gone,” Kono adds.  She’s been unusually quiet, and Steve tells himself to remember to ask her what’s up the next time he has a few minutes alone with her.  Since Danny is obviously camped out for the night, Steve thinks that won’t be any time soon.

 

Steve tries to communicate the hundred questions he’s got by frowning and looking earnest, but all that earns him is a snort from Danny.

 

“Forget it, Babe,” Danny says.  “You’re in no shape to ask questions.  You’ll have to wait until the doc says you’re stronger.  And even then…”  He trails off, apparently believing an implied threat is more effective.

 

Steve gives him a fond eye-roll and pats Danny’s hand with the one his partner’s not holding.

 

“Alright, we’re gonna let you get some sleep,” Chin says, taking the hint.  He waits for Kono to push away from the wall against which she’d been leaning and puts a solicitous hand on her shoulder as she sketches a wave at Steve and Danny and exits without a word.

 

Steve frowns at Chin, tries to say, _Look out for her_ , and Chin says, “Copy that,” just as if Steve had given the order.

 

He has a good team.

 

When they’re gone and after the nurse’s aide has bustled in, checked his IV, and bustled back out, a stream of pleasant small talk trailing after her, Danny rests his forehead against their joined hands and breathes.

 

Steve can feel the bed shaking, can see the tremor across Danny’s shoulders, and he wishes he were strong enough to draw him up onto the bed, hospital rules be damned, just to hold him, to prove that he’s alive and whole and that he isn’t going anywhere.

 

He has to settle for running his fingers through Danny’s hair and caressing the back of his neck until Danny’s trembling eases up and his breath isn’t so labored.

 

When he raises his head, he’s red-eyed, but his cheeks are dry, and he tries on a weak facsimile of a smile.

 

Steve answers it with a pretty lame version of his own.

 

“The things I’m going to do to you,” Danny murmurs, but the desperation in his eyes takes some of the heat out of the promise.

 

Steve runs his thumb over the back of Danny’s hand and says, “Promises, promises,” like a tease.

 

Danny leans over to lay the tiniest kiss at the corner of Steve’s mouth.  “Go to sleep,” he breathes against Steve’s jaw, and Steve shivers a little, cracks his jaw with an enormous yawn, and—somewhat miraculously—does as he’s told.

 

*****

 

Given how often Steve has had other people actively violating his bodily autonomy with their own, uh, bodies lately, it might seem odd to an outside observer that the first order of business when he returns home from the hospital is to take a shower with Danny—a mostly business sort of shower, in fact, of the kind that focuses on getting Steve, in particular, very clean—and then spread himself out on the bed on his belly.

 

Danny comes out of the bathroom in a towel, and his almost unconscious happy whistling fades to a different sort of sound.

 

“Really?” he asks, and there’s some disbelief in there—Steve’s been pretty grievously injured a lot lately, see, re: people sticking their teeth in him against his will—and some hope, almost heartbreaking to Steve, who wants to give this to Danny and wants to have it for himself in a wholly balanced selfless-selfish feedback loop.

 

He looks over his shoulder at Danny and waggles his eyebrows in what is supposed to be a deliberately ridiculous and entirely unsexy imitation of a Marx brother.

 

“Don’t,” Danny says, quietly, like the sound has been punched out of him with the air in his lungs.

 

At the distress on Danny’s face, Steve pushes himself onto his side so he can look at him more fully.

 

“What, Danny?” Steve asks, keeping it soft.

 

“Don’t be…”  Danny’s words break down in favor of inarticulate but vigorous gestures.

 

Steve has to shake his head: This time, he can’t interpret Danny sign.

 

“Don’t be brave,” Danny says.  “I know this is something we talked about, but…”  Again, more gestures of the indefinite variety.

 

“But what?”  Steve asks, still gentle.  “I want this, Danny.  Preferably with less talk,” he adds.  “Though…” he concedes reluctantly, “if we need to talk about it?”

 

“Babe, you just got out of the hospital.  You’ve been poked and prodded and chewed on and bled dry.  You can’t possibly think _now_ is a good time for this.”

 

“Now is the perfect time for this, Danny.  I’m fine,” Steve says, and it’s true he mostly is.   Maybe his stamina will need building up, but the rest of him is fit—certainly enough for him to lay here and take it.  Not that he plans to be a passive participant, of course.

 

“And I want this,” he repeats.  “I want you, Danny, inside me.  All the way.  As deep as you can go for as long as you can go.  I want to feel you inside me tomorrow.  I want you to leave a mark so that I can feel you with me all the time.  Okay?”

 

From Danny’s pole-axed expression, it’s clear he’s as surprised by Steve’s sudden vulnerability as Steve himself is.

  
  
Must be all that blood loss.

 

Whatever the cause, Steve isn’t retracting the words, even if he can feel a flush spreading from his face down his neck.  He swallows hard, suddenly afraid in a way he hasn’t been in a long time.  Maybe he’s said too much.  Maybe this is too far, too fast.  Maybe Danny isn’t interested anymore.

 

Before Steve can work himself up to say _Forget it_ , Danny drops the towel and moves toward the bed, and his gesture this time needs no translating.

 

Steve lays back down, cheek resting on his hands, the skin of his back gone all shivery in sudden anticipation.

 

He feels the bed dip as Danny kneels between Steve’s feet. Danny knee-walks up the bed, forcing Steve’s legs apart, and Steve shivers, a full-body motion that wrings a noise of want out of Danny.

 

“Babe,” he whispers, running a hand down Steve’s back.  “You have any idea how gorgeous you are like this?”

 

Steve’s mouth is too dry to make words, and he’s too hyper-focused to think beyond the feel of Danny’s weight on the bed, the brush of his thighs against Steve’s, the heat of his body where he hovers, maddeningly close to Steve’s ass.

 

Danny lays himself down over Steve like a blanket, pressing him into the bed, fastening his mouth around the faint red mound that’s all that’s left of where Steve’s father had chewed on him.  At the sensation of Danny’s blunt teeth scraping the old wound, Steve shouts and tries to buck up against Danny’s weight, not to escape him but because he needs—immediately and overwhelmingly—a hand on his dick.

 

Danny shushes him like a child, moves his lips to the nape of Steve’s neck, and sucks a kiss there, making Steve moan.

 

By slow degrees, Danny removes his weight, but only because he’s working his way down the individual knobs of Steve’s spine.  Every kiss is fire, a heat that leaves Steve shaking in its wake.

 

Floating on a rising sea of need, Steve almost forgets the inevitable goal of Danny’s patient, slow annihilation of him, so that when he feels his cheeks parted, feels the sudden influx of cool air and then the proximity of heat, he has only time to gasp in surprise before Danny’s tongue, hot and wet and broad, is swiping over his hole, and then he’s making mindless, wordless noises of approval.

 

Danny works him over with a thorough ruthlessness that leaves Steve a loose and sweaty mess.

 

He’s so hard he aches for touch, so desperate he thinks he might come untouched at this rate if only he could get a little friction against the comforter.

 

“Easy, Babe,” Danny murmurs, the only warning Steve gets of Danny abandoning him.  He makes a noise of protest, tries to coordinate his limbs enough to push up away from the bed and get a hand on himself, and then Danny is back, heat and weight and a slick finger against his hole, sliding in with very little resistance.

 

Steve bucks, shouts, tries not to come from the too-full rightness of it, wanting more—all of it, right now.

 

Some of that must manage to make its way out of his mouth because Danny chuckles, says, “Bossy,” and adds a second finger, which wrings a high, keening sound out of Steve.

 

Steve doesn’t recognize himself, isn’t fully aware of his existence separate from Danny.  Everything in his being is focused on the fingers in his ass and on Danny’s throaty recitation of the things he’s going to do to Steve.

 

Steve wants him to talk less and put his cock where his mouth was, but he can’t articulate his need beyond a gasped _Please_ and _Danny_ and _More!_

When, at last, Danny urges him onto his knees and holds him steady with a strong hand on one hip, Steve is shaking with need, rocking back toward Danny, open and wanting.

 

“Steve,” Danny says, something beautifully undone in his voice, and then the blunt head of his cock is piercing the ring of muscle and Steve’s breath is punched out of him by the enormity of what’s happening to him.

 

“Danny,” he cries, rocking back again to take Danny’s cock deeper. 

 

Danny grips both of Steve’s hips, holding him firmly in place.

 

“Hold still,” he chides, but he’s so breathless, it doesn’t really sound much like an order.

 

Danny holds them both there, frozen for a long moment with his cock just breaching Steve’s ass, and then Danny thrusts, sliding all the way home, and Steve chokes on air, coughs, convulses around Danny’s cock, feeling that too.

 

“Danny,” he begs, and Danny finally relents, reaching to wrap his hand around Steve’s cock, shoving Steve into the tight ring of Danny’s fingers even as he angles his hips and strikes a spot inside Steve that sets him on fire.

 

Steve shouts again, a hoarse babble of expletives and love, and comes, the orgasm driving him down onto his elbows, changing the angle of Danny’s relentless thrusts until it’s almost too much.  Just as Steve thinks he can’t take any more, Danny cries out, hips making little abortive thrusts against Steve’s ass as he empties himself in a hot spill that makes Steve gasp, “Oh my god, Danny.  _Danny_!”

 

In the aftermath, Steve can feel Danny’s cock pulsing weakly as his ass milks him to the last.  Danny’s breath comes in hitching little gasps, almost like sobbing, and his hand on Steve’s hip trembles.

 

Steve has come apart.  He feels riven open, emptied of everything except the single, vital connection he shares with Danny.  He can’t speak—there are no words, even if his mouth weren’t dry as bone.  His own breath breaks harshly against the coverlet beneath him. 

 

He feels, inexplicably, like he might cry.

 

He must make some noise, an aborted, animal sound, because Danny begins to pull away, says, “Babe?” and uses the hand not bracing himself at Steve’s hip to stroke down his back.

 

“ ’m okay,” Steve manages, though it might be a lie—he’s having difficulty telling.  It feels like there’s an enormous bubble in his chest about to burst.

 

 “You’re not,” Danny demurs, sliding out of him.  Steve hisses at the sudden loss of connection, and Danny soothes him again, urging him down onto his belly, wet spot be damned, so that he can kiss the sweat-damp small of Steve’s back and revisit the knob at the top of his spine, and nibble at his ear and whisper, “I love you.”

 

Those words, which Steve has heard Danny say before, land like darts, sharp little prickles of terror and exhilaration breaking across his shoulders and his forehead.

 

Steve gulps, feeling like his heart might push up out of his throat, and says, “I love you,” right back, and then finds the strength to roll onto his side so that he can pull Danny to him, press their bodies together from lips to toes.  They’re sticky with come and sweat, the heavy tang of sex coating their tongues as they take slow, leisurely sips of each other’s breath.

 

Steve doesn’t realize he’s crying until Danny says, “Babe,” and touches his cheek to bring his fingers away wet.

 

“You’re such a sap, you know that,” Danny goes on, but there’s infinite tenderness in the observation, and Steve finds he doesn’t mind Danny knowing this about him, seeing him like this.

 

“Only for you,” he amends, making sure Danny sees his resolve on his face. 

 

“As it should be,” Danny answers, smiling.  There’s a little bit of smug in there, and Steve finds that’s alright, since he’s the one who put it on his face. 

 

Then, Danny grimaces.  “Babe, this is disgusting.”

 

It is: Their come has dried to a tacky residue, sticking their belly hair together, and a fug of stale sex and sweat hangs over the bed.

 

“Shower,” they say in unison, and spend some time taxing Steve’s overworked hot water tank.


	6. Chapter the Last

If Steve is walking a little gingerly as he makes his way into the office the next day, no one says a word.

 

They don’t have to:  Danny’s smirk is an epic spoiler, revealing all to anyone who knows them.

 

Surprisingly, it’s Chin who teases Steve with a knowing, “You look happy,” and Kono who keeps her thoughts to herself.

 

Steve gives her a head-nod toward his office, and she trails him slowly, like she’s reluctant for what’s to come.

 

He doesn’t interrogate her, though, just perches carefully against the edge of his desk, hands curled around the desk edge to either side, trying to radiate openness and patience, though there’s a cold spot growing in his belly as he waits for what she’s going to say.

 

He lets his silence do the asking for him, and after a few moments of tense quiet, Kono slumps, looks down at the floor, and shakes her head, externalizing some interior monologue.

 

“He gave me a message for you,” Kono says. 

 

By the way she says the name, Steve knows she means Wo Fat and not his father, who, like Honolulu’s Master, has been conspicuously absent since the battle at the refinery.

 

“Okay,” Steve says, making it into a question and fighting the desire to cross his arms over his chest, like that could somehow protect him from whatever damage Wo Fat’s words will cause.

 

Kono shakes her head again, face troubled.

 

“It’s okay,” Steve reiterates, “Just tell me.”  It’s a gentle order but an order nonetheless.

 

Kono squares her shoulders and looks Steve in the eye.  “He said to tell you he didn’t kill your mother and to ask your father about Shelburne.”

 

Steve tries to process that for a minute.  It could be a mindfuck—probably is—but it also leads to some interesting avenues of inquiry.

 

“There’s one other thing,” Kono notes, and she sounds like she’s had to drag each syllable out of herself.

 

Steve just looks at her, waiting, arms crossed—he’s only just noticed—internally bracing for the worst.

 

“It’s probably just me,” she avers, stalling, and then, at his slight shift of weight, the only indication of impatience he succumbs to, Kono says, “But I got the impression when he said he hadn’t killed your mother…well, the emphasis he used was on the world ‘killed.’  Like…” 

 

She doesn’t have to continue.  Steve knows where she’s going with the sentence.

 

“You think my mother might still be alive?”  Steve is having a hard time swallowing around the idea, but he recognizes that everything he’d assumed about his family so far has proven false, so why should this be any different?

 

Kono shrugs.  “Wo Fat is probably just messing with you, Boss,” but she doesn’t say it like she believes it.

 

“Okay,” Steve answers, thinking.  “Can I ask you to keep this between us for now?  Until I have more to go on, I’d rather not get the team involved.”

  
He knows it’s an unfair burden, but Kono seems grateful to have an achievable goal, and she nods like maybe a weight’s been taken off her shoulders.

 

“Thanks, Kono.  I appreciate it.”

 

“We’re ohana,” she says, with the easy verbal shrug of someone who takes that fact for granted.  It lights a steady, warm fire in his chest to hear how confident she is in him—in them all.  “Besides, you and Danny deserve a little time together before we go chasing the next impossible quest.”

 

Steve laughs at her choice of words, but she’s not wrong.  He does have a habit of tilting at windmills.

 

“We should get back,” he suggests then, gesturing to the smart table, where Chin and Danny seem to be arguing good-naturedly over something on the screens.

 

When they’re all assembled there, Steve says, “Why don’t we take the day off, hit the North Shore?”

 

“Yeah?” Chin asks, a skeptical smile on his face.

 

“I’m fine,” Steve answers, guessing his concern.  “I’ll take it easy. Promise.”

 

Danny rolls his eyes but doesn’t otherwise protest.

 

As they head toward the doors together, Danny’s hand hovering at the small of Steve’s back, Kono and Chin jokingly threatening to teach Danny to surf, Steve feels that warmth in his chest spread to the rest of him, and he can’t help the goofy smile he knows he’s wearing.  He’s got ohana who care about and love him.  The man he loves is at his side, and the bad guys have gone underground, at least long enough to let them have this perfect day in the sun.

 

In the elevator, he slings an arm around Danny, pulling him off-balance so he can plant a wet, loud kiss on his temple.

 

“I love you,” he says, meaning all of them, and Kono and Chin answer in kind.

  
Danny doesn’t say anything, but he puts his arm around Steve’s waist and squeezes, and Steve decides then and there to make more time for this, for them.  Yeah, maybe his father is out to screw him over somehow.  Maybe Wo Fat is planning his next act of revenge against Steve.

 

Maybe his mother is alive out there somewhere, and maybe his father knew it all along.

 

None of that matters right now.  Right now, he’s got ohana and Danny and sun and surf, and that?  That’s more than he ever dreamed he’d have.

 

Steve’s going to take what he can get for as long as he can get it and let tomorrow worry about itself.


End file.
